Here’s a new solution to one of my oldest kitchen problems: what do you do with the little bits of leftover vegetables and meat that aren’t really enough for a new meal? Recently I’ve been making a quick Korean jeon-style batter and turning leftovers into savory pancakes, even when I’m not working with traditionally Korean ingredients.

I was inspired by the brilliant recipe developer Eric Kim, who wrote about jeon in the Times a few months ago. Korean cuisine has dozens of types of jeon ranging from lightly battered slices of meat to latke-like potato pancakes to seafood or fresh vegetables or kimchi suspended in a batter and pan fried, and usually served with a dipping sauce. It’s the latter style that I’m talking about here.

My “innovation”, if I can stretch that word to its breaking point, is to use the typical vegetable jeon technique for leftover cooked food. In the last week I’ve made jeon-style pancakes out of:

The technique couldn’t be easier. Make a simple batter and keep it in the fridge until you’re ready. Add leftovers, uniformly diced or left whole (long scallions or spinach leaves spreading across the pancake can be dramatic), or add fresh vegetables or raw slices of meat that will quickly cook in the batter—diced carrots, strips of beef, little shrimp. Mix everything together, pan-fry for 2 or 3 minutes on each side, and serve. You get a hot, golden, crispy pancake that feels like a totally new meal.

You can use barely enough batter to keep the ingredients together for an almost-tempura-like effect, or use more for a thicker pancake. I like to stir in a few tablespoons of whatever sauce the leftovers have to thin and flavor the batter, especially with something like kimchi. You can flavor the batter with soy sauce or dried pepper or Asian-style chicken bouillon powder or omit them for a milder flavor. It’s all very forgiving and very adaptable.

My kids really like these little jeonlings, and I briefly thought I could use them to smuggle vegetables he normally wouldn’t touch into the younger one. But he’s wilier than I anticipated and he efficiently ate around the kale, leaving a small pile in the center of his otherwise clean plate.

Breaking: As we go to press I have learned that there is actually such a thing as premade jeon mix, like the one pictured here. If you’ve got a good Korean market near you, it sounds like you can make this even easier on yourself.

I’ve been playing around with a free, open-source app called RecipeSage RecipeSage to save and organize recipes I find online. It does a cool trick I haven’t seen before, creating and saving a recipe from a description that isn’t even written like one.

So for instance it took this paragraph from a Reddit post in the r/ninjacreami subreddit:

And it formatted it like this:

Neato! Jury’s out on the rest of the app, but this feature alone makes it worth trying.

Tuesday I realized that the expiration date on our milk was coming up much faster than we’d been able to use it and so for the first time in my life I made yogurt in my Instant Pot. It was more work than I thought it would be—there’s a lot of upfront temperature-monitoring and stirring—but the yogurt is excellent. Tangy and fresh, though maybe a little thin. I’m going to experiment with this more in the weeks to come.

It was 100 degrees most of the week here in LA so naturally I decided to turn on the oven for 3 hours and braise some beef shanks. Totally worth it and meltingly good served with lemony roasted potatoes and a green salad. My younger son heard us talking about the famous mayonnaise cake after I sent last week’s newsletter and wanted a chance to redeem himself, so he made it again with the correct measurements, and it was great!

We won a school auction we hadn’t particularly read the fine print on and now have 18 jars of (really good) peanut butter, so I’m constantly looking for ways to use them up. This week that meant chicken satay with peanut sauce, coconut rice, and a cucumber salad.

A kitchen song is a song I like to listen to in my kitchen.

“The Village” by New Order. Listen to this when you finally got the thing in the oven and you can turn your attention to the salad.

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Simmer Down is a weekly newsletter about cooking real food at home for people who want to do that but think they’re too busy to, written by me, Yossi Langer, a busy person with kids in Los Angeles.

I don’t use AI to write Simmer Down. Any emdashes are my own. I do use Claude to generate what’s called the SEO summary for the web version. This is not a statement of belief, just a personal preference: I’m writing this because I like to write. Any mistakes are my own.