Just Three (Leftovers): Rib Eye, Mac-n-Cheese, Onion Marmalade

Stove-top Rib Eye, basted in Butter and Fresh Herbs

A clear violation of my self-imposed rules of "Just Three", using leftover like this, but the principal advantage of blogging, and self-imposed rules generally, lies rooted in the simple fact that one may ultimately do whatever one wishes. Of course, your readers may kvetch, but that's part of the game.

I could drape my transgression with pearls of wisdom and wit, or I could lean on my earlier arguments (e.g., here, and here) that leftovers play a fundamental role in the kitchen - the avoidance of waste, the efficiency of leveraging time already invested, and, above all, the enforced discipline of making something new out of something old - but the simple truth is that I cooked for company last Saturday night and one of the invited couples was a late-day no-show. Ergo, come Sunday, I had a spare steak (a rib eye from Painted Hills, who really do things right, by the way) and several cubic meters of seriously high-density Mac-n-Cheese (recipe forthcoming from the thread started here). I was also pretty sure I had some more of my spiced onion marmalade somewhere on an upper deck, and a plan came together, a plan with the elusive trifecta of zero prep, zero shopping, and a single pan.