I made some good progress on using up leftovers yesterday…I ate the last little bit of stir-fried vegetables, and the last bit of tortellini salad, and I used up some leftover grilled chicken in last night’s dinner. And instead of throwing out some brown rice that I wasn’t going to get around to eating this week, I put it in the freezer(hopefully I will actually get around to eating it before it gets freezer burnt). I also grilled a lone soon-to-be-inedible red pepper with our dinner last night because I figured I’d be more likely to eat a grilled one.
After all that, I had just some shrimp pasta salad left(I’ll eat that at lunch today…and probably tomorrow) and a bowl of some leftover canned crushed pineapple. I wasn’t sure what to do with it…we’d put some of it into a yogurt smoothie and I wasn’t terribly impressed with the results. Then I remembered that I have a bar recipe that uses canned pineapple…8 ounces to be exact, and that’s precisely how much I had. Yay! And then I also remembered that this recipe needed a cup of cranberries. Now, it’s been quite a while since Thanksgiving and Christmas, so I didn’t think I’d have any. But, lo and behold, in the depths of my chest freezer, there was a small bag of frozen cranberries, and this bag contained exactly one cup. Clearly, these pineapple cranberry bars were meant to be. 
I’m heading off to clean my fridge, and I’ll get my food waste photo up either this afternoon or tomorrow. I’m pretty optimistic that it will be a week on part with last week, considering how empty my fridge is looking right now.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the comment. The parallel universe thing gets stranger and stranger. I noticed that your 4 are 3 girls and a boy, right? Mine too! In this order: Girl, boy, girl, girl. Ages 7, 5, 3, and 0.
And I was also homeschooled through high school. I wrote about it somewhere. I will be reading your blog just to see what other things we have in common! LOL
Yup, I have three girls and a boy, but mine go boy, girl, girl, girl. And mine are ages almost 9, 7, 4, and 2…so most of mine are just two years older than yours(although my three year age gap is between #2 and #3, instead of between #3 and #4!).
Pictures of all of them are on my photo blog, which is linked in my sidebar if you’re interested.
Ahhh, I love how the pineapple and cranberries thing turned out so perfectly – it was meant to be!
Do you have the recipe anywhere? Cranberries and pineapple sounds lovely together.
Wasn’t that lovely? And of course, the kids and I had no trouble eating the whole pan of bars(rarely do I let dessert go bad! lol)
I haven’t posted the recipe, but I can type it up and post it for you. Are cranberries available at this time of year where you live? Here you can only get them around November and December.