I grossly overestimated the amount of gravy my kids would put on their chicken fried steak the other night. I could have thrown it out. Tim could have chugged it single-handedly. But thanks to the waste not, want not side of me, I opted to incorporate it into another meal this week:biscuits and gravy. Yum.
When my husband and I got married, he brought with him a strong aversion to leftovers. I quickly cured him of that.
Here are my favorite ways to use up leftovers:
- If there’s enough for another meal, throw it in a labeled Ziploc freezer bag, lay it flat in the freezer until solid, then line it up filing-cabinet style in your freezer. Like so.
As a side note, my very favorite meals to freeze include: Indian food (meat and sauce), Chili, Chicken (Our family doesn’t eat an entire chicken from Costco so I shred up the rest, pop it in a freezer bag and save it to make something else another day), meaty spaghetti sauce, and pulled pork (or chicken, or beef). It is delightful to thumb through my freezer filing cabinet on a busy day, pop the leftovers in a crockpot and only have to worry about whipping up a vegetable or grain to accompany it. - Stow it in a clear container in the fridge and enjoy it for lunch another day. Store them at eye level so they don’t disappear into the dark abyss. If your leftovers start to pile up, designate one night of the week “leftover night” and have each of the kids pick out his/her favorite to reheat for a hodge podge dinner. Everyone gets what they want. It’s almost like eating at a restaurant. Almost.
- Plan a meal around it. Put the right side of your brain to work and come up with another way to use up what’s left behind. For instance, when we have taco salad for dinner, I invariably end up with extra lettuce and cheese. So the next morning I sprinkle all of that cheese on scrambled eggs for the kids’ breakfast and throw some grilled chicken strips(frozen leftovers, naturally) on the lettuce for a lunch salad. Or I might use the cheese to make quesadillas and the lettuce to pull together a Caesar salad to go with pasta that night. The possibilities are endless but you’ve got to get creative. Or just google recipes that use up leftover ingredients.
One of these days I’ll get around to posting some of my faves. Until then, get your own creative juices flowing so you don’t have to guilt your kids into eating more than they want by telling them about the starving kids in Africa. Because, while guilt trips might be effective, they aren’t necessarily the best course of action for weight management, or for saving your wallet, or for showing gratitude for the abundance we enjoy. Or for learning compassion for the starving kids in Africa, for that matter. So yeah. Leftovers for the win.