I was looking in my pantry for ingredients to make some kind of cookie or treat today, and found that I had everything to make rice cripy treats except for the cereal. No big deal, I used up a box of different cinnamon sugar cereal that has been sitting on top of our fridge for months inatead. The cereal treats turned out great! It got me thinking, what other leftovers can be reporposed into other dishes? One easy way to save money on groceries is to simply stop throwing food away. It is all too easy to pitch the stale potato chips left in the bag into the garbage, until you remind yourself that this is money being thrown away! A weekly meal plan can help reduce the amount of leftovers you have by using up the items that will soon expire first when planning what meals to make for the week. I do this and we still have food leftover. I do not mind eating leftovers, however my husband really does not like to eat the same meal two days in a row. How do we use up our leftovers? If it's a meal my husband particularly likes, he will take leftovers from the previous night's dinner to work the next day for lunch. I almost always have leftovers for lunch. Also, I try to plan one night per week where dinner is an assortment of leftovers from the past 3 or 4 nights' dinners. If there isn't a whole lot of any leftovers I might make a side dish to go with "leftover night," such as baked potatoes, steamed vegetables, or macaroni and cheese, depending on what the leftovers are that it is going with. In an effort to not have to eat so many leftovers of the same thing all of the time, I am trying to come up with more ways to reporpose leftovers into something new, such as the cereal treats mentioned earlier in this post. One idea I've seen is Chili Mac, where you take leftover chili and mix it into fresh homemade macaroni and cheese. Do you ever recreate leftovers into new dishes? What are some ways you use up your leftovers?
I usually do this with cereal, but in a different vein. We usually buy relatively sugar-free cereal in my house - Rice Krispies and Corn Flakes, for the most part - and we almost always get sick of the stuff before the end of the box. Out solution is to throw the remaining cereal into some sort of pasta dish to give it more crunch. Mac and cheese is delicious with Corn Flakes crunched up and thrown on top. Now that I think about it, you can mix almost anything into mac and cheese. The chili idea is a good one.
I am a great one for putting left over vegetables in omelettes. They taste good in there and make the eggs healthier as well. When I was young, my mother used to make candy out of left over mashed potatoes. It really tasted good, and was easy to make, simply required powered sugar, peanut butter and a bit of leftover mashed potatoes. Adding a bit of food coloring made it attractive. I think people in the "old days" were a bit more frugal and used leftovers better than we have.
We are always on the lookout for leftovers that's why we always calculate the amount of food that we cook. But sometimes leftovers cannot be avoided. Particularly with rice, we keep it in soft plastic bag inside the fridge where they can last for days up to a week. Just 2 minutes in the microwave and the rice can be eaten again. And when it's in a big volume, we make it into fried rice Chinese style. That way, no rice is wasted.
I cook for my daughter and two teenage boys. My daughter and one of her son's do not like to eat leftovers so I try to not have a lot of leftovers. I will use the leftovers in homemade soup most of the time, once a week I go thru the refrig and freeze everything that has not been eaten, a spoon of this and a spoon of that, makes good soup. A treat I like to make when I want to make cookies real quick, is one box of cake frosting, one egg and one cup of flour, I add oatmeal to make the cookies crispy, real good and real quick.
I agree. Not throwing away food is a must in our family as it is seen as a bad behavior. The way we have been taught to go about this is to plan meals as best as we can, so in that way we can also plan for the leftovers of certain dishes. Some fried meat dishes, for example, can be turned into stews later on, so on some fried dishes we usually cook more than enough so we'll have leftovers that don't need to be cooked from scratch again. This way we get to save on time and food that could have gone to waste.
I grew up that we don't throw away left overs. That's lunch, dinner, or a snack for the next day. We eat up all the leftovers. There is no food to waste when you don't have money to waste it. That's the lesson that I am trying to teach my children right now, but they are much harder to teach than I was and I'm constantly finding food in the trash. It irritates me. I want to strangle them for it sometimes. I believe in saving food for the next day if we can.
I'm not keen on anything over a day old. I know it's a psychological thing but I just find old food so offputting. For me, the trick to avoiding leftovers is not to cook too much in the first place and put anything that is left at the end of the day straight into the freezer.
I never throw food away. If veggies are going old then I throw them in a pot and make a veggie broth that I freeze for later. You can always re-purpose food and make a yummy second meal. I hate being so wasteful!
I always try my best to use up all leftovers. However there are times when I can't. If for example I have to be away from home for a week and there were some leftovers . . . But that doesn't necessarily mean they'll be of no use. The leftovers I can't use will end up in a compost pit. To avoid having to think about ways not to waste food, better cook only the "right" amount of food. You should know what will be enough, when it will be more than enough and so on. It will save you some money in the long run.
I try to make just enough so not to have left overs. I make enough for supper and extras for 3 lunches. One of my kids will not eat leftovers for lunch while my other son will only eat leftovers for lunch. I hate wasting food but if I over estimate on things like rice or mashed potatoes, I'll use them in a dish later on in the week. I turn the rice into fried rice and the mashed potatoes I'll usually use in shepherd's pie. If I have extra ground beef I'll make it into soup. Leftovers from a roast can be made into a quick dinner the next night. We'll just eat the roast beef on toast with gravy.
That's a real money saver when you repurpose your foods. I found that cooking less helps too have less leftovers too. I'd try to get things to cook that you can control and cook less to have different kinds of meals everyday for the family when you have someone in the family that loves to eat different everyday. Macaroni dishes are very controlled for you can pour as much as you want per meal. The marinara sauce can be frozen until next use too, so can the white sauce be frozen until the next meal. Hope this was helpful!
Using up leftovers is very smart. I'm horrible at it though and my husband hates when they don't get used up. They just never sound good to me again or I don't know what my problem is. A lot of times I'll eat them, but sometimes I let them go to waste and it's horrible. My kids are also very picky with what they eat so they don't eat what we have for dinners and lunches. It's almost all up to me to get them eaten. It's a good way to save food that's already in the house as well. You don't need to use up other things if you have leftovers.
I would say for the most part I try to cook only enough for me to eat that day - only certain items will I make in larger quantities to be used again as leftovers in other dishes. And when I do do that, I try to make sure the seasonings on them are very neutral, so the leftovers can be used in a lot of different recipes. For example, if I was making some roasted chickens, I wouldn't season them with something like a Jamaican Jerk blend, or some BBQ seasoning - I would just use some salt and pepper, and maybe some garlic and parsley, and that's it. That way I could use it in a variety of recipes from casseroles, to tacos, to chicken salad, and not worry about some other lingering flavors not working with the new dishes I'm making. Rice is one thing I will make extra of, since it takes a while to cook and it's convenient to have some leftover rice for making stuffed peppers, or fried rice. Baked potatoes is another thing I will make extra of, because they're quick to re-heat for future dishes, and there are so many recipes they can be used in. I will often slice them up and fry them in the morning to make home fries. I've also made potato gnocchi from them as well.
When there is fried chicken left, it gets stored in the ref and made into a dish with sauce. That's a good way to recycle leftovers, turn them into a completely new recipe.
