One tip to avoid food waste: Eat things that don't go together
One of my readers left a comment recently saying that my menu posts had inspired her to not worry so much about making meals where everything "went together".
I can definitely see why she said that, because as long as my meals are checking off the basic food categories, I don't worry about coordinating the components of the meal too much.
I mean, I'm not out here spreading grape jelly on chicken livers or anything, but I do often base my side dish choices on what food needs to be used up rather than what ideally would go with the main dish.
If you'd usually serve rice with a meal, but your potatoes are getting old, serve potatoes instead.
If you're out of veggies at dinnertime, but you've got fruit, serve that instead.
A little flexibility goes a long way toward preventing food waste!
Random not-chef-approved lunches
My penchant for randomness in the name of food waste prevention is even more apparent when I'm making lunch for myself.
Since I'm usually home at lunchtime, I do a scan of the fridge to find things that need to be used and I build my lunch around those.
Sometimes, this means I have a strange combo of foods.
For instance, the other day at lunch, I ate:
- fried egg white (egg white leftover from making alfredo sauce)
- a serving of leftover green beans
- some sauteed veggies (onion, carrot, and green pepper)
- reheated pasta alfredo.
If you tried to sell a plate of that at a restaurant, Gordon Ramsay would probably come visiting.
But I got protein, produce, and starch in, and I emptied several containers of random things from my fridge.
The three S's
If you want to use up your random bits of food but you want to make them into something more cohesive, I suggest these three options:
- soup
- scrambled eggs
- salads
You can use almost any random produce or meat leftovers in one of those three dishes.
Also, they're really easy to make for just one person, which is perfect when you only have a small amount of an item.
I'm not a very creative cook. And even I can do this.
I'm a pretty diehard recipe follower; I've never been someone who can just magically figure out what to make for dinner after a peek in the fridge.
But salad, soup, and scrambled eggs are simple enough for even me to play around with.
And you do not have to be creative at all to eat a bunch of unrelated things; you just have to be flexible!
In summary, avoid food waste by...
- thinking outside the box when you're putting dinner together
- thinking in food groups (proteins, produce, starch) vs. things that "go together"
- tie together random foods by making soup, scrambled eggs, or a salad
Readers, if you are good at using up unrelated foods, I'd love for you to share your tips in the comments.
P.S. I often make meals of random things by cooking them in a cast-iron skillet with hot grease. Here are my best tips for random skillet meals.
P.P.S. Need some motivation to eat random stuff? Here are four reason you should care about avoiding food waste.
In my household, this is called smorgasborg. I have one about once a week, to clear out the fridge and avoid food waste.
Thats what we call it too! And, when I serve it, the kids come running, as the leftovers are first come, first serve. If you want it, you'd better bet everyone else to it!
Many years ago I was dating a man who taught me the word "musgoes". It's when you look in the refrigerator and think, "this must go, that must go."
I still use the word sometimes when asked what is for dinner.
MUSGOES
Anne, "musgoes" is seriously funny. I've always called it a smorgasbord, but I think I like your version better.
In the past year or two I've been making a baked potato bar as an easy-peasy meal (you can bake potatoes in your crockpot, BTW). Add a protein and some sort of veggie and you're good to go. Fun toppings help (shredded cheese, sour cream/Greek yogurt, etc.) if you have picky eaters. SO many options .... pizza potatoes, Mexi-potatoes, ham & cheese potatoes ....
I sometimes think that the plethora of cooking advice we get online/on TV is a two-edged sword. It's great to look for new ideas, but as long as it's relatively healthy, who cares if it isn't picture perfect?
My mom called it “international night”! And now I do too.
I usually do do a frittata but my MIL has turned all leftovers into a cold salad (like a chicken salad). I also turn many left overs into quesadillas and my kids get excited about leftovers
Great suggestions for using up leftovers. Adding an egg to anything makes it delicious!
Two options I also use are breakfast bowls and fried rice.
Friday night's dinner was breakfast bowls featuring leftover baked potatoes and grilled sausage from Wednesday's dinner. I diced the potatoes and fried them up in bacon grease (also leftover!), and cut the sausages into bite sized pieces and tossed in the pan just long enough to brown the edges. Sauteed half a bell pepper that was starting to get soft, and scrambled some eggs. Everyone puts together their own bowls and tops them with shredded cheese, and I added some fresh spinach to mine. (I am always trying to use up a bag of spinach before it goes bad)
Sunday night's fried rice featured the following random leftover items from the fridge: the last few tired veggies from a crudite platter, half a wrinkly red bell pepper, a grilled pork chop and steamed baby carrots from Thursday's dinner, and a handful of sugar snap peas from a 2 pound bag I got on clearance and am trying to use up.
Looking forward to leftover fried rice for lunch today!
I stash leftover bits of spinach in the freezer in a big gallon bag and then I use that when making quiches, soups, dips or smoothies. If you crunch it up while frozen it turns into shards that cook in seconds.
I do this all the time - I eat random bits and bobs of stuff for breakfast with an egg, which seems to tie it all together. On weekends, I pack up whatever we didn't eat during the week (which isn't much) and purchase maybe one other thing and we make do. It makes me fee creative and virtuous all at the same time. (: And we do the smorgasbord idea with freezer leftovers when I need to clean it out. Everyone gets to mix and match their meal and it all gets eaten up.
I find risotto (oven baked, super easy, no stirring) & pizza are both great dinner options for repurposing leftovers. For lunches, i also like to put protein on top of a salad.
a spaghetti/tomato sauce and a quiche are also a great ways to use up leftovers.
This is so me. I seriously eat the weirdest combinations of foods but, idk it doesn't bother me. I don't necessarily cook dinners that way because the family doesn't appreciate it, but leftovers for myself, I do. Oh and yes, I put a fried egg on top of pretty much anything, lol.
When I was growing up, my mother would have what she called a "Picky" supper, meaning everyone picks out what they want. She'd heat up all the dribs and drabs of stuff in the frog and then we'd all eat whatever we wanted, whether it fit together or not. I do the same periodically. I also do what you suggested, and put leftovers on top of salads, etc. And while I really like breakfast foods, I don't have a problem with eating non-breakfast foods in the morning. Since I eat breakfast before my husband gets up, I'll sometimes eat some of the leftovers for breakfast and he'll make himself oatmeal later on. I'm trying very hard not to throw food away.
Ooops! She didn't put it in the frog. She put it in the refrigerator! The computer changed it to frog.
I just thought you might be from a different English-speaking country that had a slang word for either fridge or oven. I felt I was learning something today, so I'm kind of disappointed it was just an auto-correct error.
I honestly think we should all start calling our fridges frogs instead.
lol I thought it was British like frog 'n toad (road).. or steak 'n kidney (Sydney)
Hi,
Love this post! It makes so much sense.
Have a lovely day, and thank you for not overlooking "simple" subjects when blogging.
Our go-to for leftovers is a fried potato hash, pyttipanna 😉
Whenever we have cooked leftover potatoes and some meat (especially sausage), we dice them up and fry them in a skillet. You add onions and any vegetables you have on hand, such as peppers, diced green beans, peas, etc. Last week we used chopped up asparagus stems. You top it with an egg, of course!
Any assortment of condiments is also allowed.
https://www.thespruceeats.com/pytt-i-panna-swedish-hash-2952866
It is not abnormal for us to have a leftover meal where we all have something different in an effort to use up food. Normally I try to cook enough at every meal for my husband and I to take a lunch the next day, so we don't have a ton of leftover on the weekend, but we always have eggs, tortillas and canned tuna, so normally something can be whipped together in a pinch.
Since my husband works from home and I’m a stay at home mom, we eat nearly every meal at home. On theme with “things that don’t traditionally go together”, we often have things that we have leftover from dinner as part of breakfast the next day. Chicken or pork? Breakfast tacos! Random roasted veggies? Throw them in an omelette. I’m not sure the history of why we designate certain types of foods to one time of day over the other, but I’m all for bucking that trend. 😉
We always use our leftovers in this hodgepodge way. It makes for variety, pleasing everyone, and no waste. I don't have the guts to mix stuff together, but I lay them out separately and we pick our own tidbits. My mother used to save leftover meat, freeze it, and then use a pile of it to make stew or pepper steak. I rarely make a slab of meat, but if we do have some sort of steak or chop, I reheat it in broth, and it tastes like new. Casseroles and veggies are easier to redo.
This is exactly what I do. I also love that to serve breakfast for dinner or whatever else I can plop on a plate. As long as we are all fed I call dinner a success. For some reason we wrap our heads around picture perfect food network dinners, but at the end of the day I serve what we have on hand and I’m happy we all ate. Less wasted food and less guilt about it!
Great post! I serve "grain bowls" to use up lots of little bits of foods. Cooked grains, topped with cooked foods, tied together with a sauce (salad dressing, hot sauce, etc.) Just yesterday, I cooked a pot of brown rice and topped each bowl with bits of leftovers: sauteed kale, chicken meatloaf, boiled eggs, pickles and oranges.
While we are very good with using up cooked foods, my big food waste battle lies with uncooked foods. A whole package of defrosted chicken in the fridge goes uncooked. Bunches of green, leafy veggies turn yellow. Potatoes get moldy. Etc, Etc........
Tamar Adler’s book “An Everlasting Meal” is an interesting read that includes discussion of not just how to use up leftovers, but how to sometimes magic them into something new. Although, to be honest, there are more than a few times she suggests to just throw an egg on it, as so many of you have mentioned!
An egg is an endlessly useful thing to add to a concoction of random things!
An Everlasting Meal is one of my all-time favorite books!
I love all of your suggestions for using up leftovers. My favorite way is to make quesadillas - I've added brussel sprouts, sweet potatoes, broccoli, beans, chicken, etc and they're always good.
You have also inspired me to be more relaxed about side dishes/veggies. I work part-time and have young kids, and dinner is *so* hard sometimes. While before I also stressed about preparing a separate veggie side dish, I was inspired by your blog to just add chopped carrots, chopped cucumbers, fruit slices, etc. It's also a great way to use up leftover veggies from the fridge -- I just chop up and place in a pretty bowl on the table! 🙂
Yes! A white serving dish really makes it look like you put in a lot of effort. Heh.
I love these kinds of posts, especially with your inspiring pictures! Thanks!
This is pretty much how I cook most nights! We’ll do 1-2 “planned meals” a week, and then make soup or (my favorite) fried rice out of the odds and ends left over. Right now I’m eating what feels like a random (but is actually delicious) salad of leftover burger, fries, and veggies with homemade ranch dip - AKA hamburger salad. It is SO yummy and super thrown together. Fried rice on Friday nights is another favorite to use up odd and ends.
So true -- i only really cook a couple times and then am assembling or reheating and scrounging.
I grew up in a strongly German-ancestry area, which may or may not have had anything to do with this, but keeping a soup pot on the back of the old wood or coal stove for leftovers was common. I was told it was a German thing. Actual Germans should feel free to disagree. 🙂 I did the same with my own family, with the modern addition of freezing or chilling leftover meats, veggies and grains and making soup (we called it junk soup) at the end of the week.
My mother would serve the smorgasbord type meals when she had a lot of leftovers, so we sometimes had meals that were anything but coordinated. This was an eye-opener to my husband when he first ate with my parents during a stay at their house. His mother -- are you sitting down? -- threw out all leftovers after a meal. All of them. Meat and all. I witnessed this myself (in silent horror, I might add). She had been a young adult during the Depression, born into a struggling farm family. I guess she decided to be wasteful if she wanted, once she could afford it, maybe.
It always seems like we get the idea that some foods can't go together, but that's just conditioning. I'm glad you pointed it out!
Wow. Just, wow.
Oh gosh, we love love LOVE leftovers. Unless it stunk the first night -- and even then we try to soldier on with it. Husband is not too picky so that helps 🙂
I LOVE having leftover chicken flautas from the local restaurant. After I have had my fill at the restaurant of the fairly generous portion, I dump everything from my plate into the take home box, (beans, rice, lettuce, chicken flautas, guacamole, and any left over chips or salsa).
Then, usually my next meal, I chop up the flauta a bit, and put everything in a bowl, pour a can of chicken broth over the top, add maybe a few veggies or salsa if I have some in the fridge-frog, and microwave it. A little extra cheese at the end, and it is So Good.
My husband has no interest in this. His leftover choice is what he calls "scrapple"-- Fried potato (pre cooked), some meat, some veggies, onion, and eggs. The little frying pan makes just the right size serving.
I agree with surprise/shock at the throwing away! My depression era parents did not do so, and the joke with my in-laws was that my mother-in-law kept moving things to smaller and smaller containers after every meal until they were all eaten. (She said her mother had limited fridge space, and always did that, so she picked up the habit, even with her larger fridge. To me, it would just be more dishes to wash).
My Mom was always making up applesauce to cover some of the fruit requirements. My Dad, still living at 96, feels guilty when he doesn't have what he defines as a balanced meal, as was drilled into him decades ago, maybe in the army and in mid-last-century homemaking magazines. We are much conditioned in our food preferences!
My daughter has "fix your own" night when the leftovers pile up in the fridge. I think that's being frugal at its best. I love leftovers...good food already made.
That was supposed to reply to JD!
Utilizing your freezer and dehydrator is key to food waste. Make too much soup? Don't throw it out, freeze it! Buy too much parsely? Dehydrate it! Have a bunch of fruit that is going bad? Freeze it for smoothies or to make compote later. Or dehydrate it! Have a a few pieces of bread? Keep a bag in the freezee of bread odds and ends. Once the bag is full, make bread pudding, baked French toast, or stuffing. Leftover veggies make great salsas, which can also be frozen. Meal planning is also so helpful to reduce food waste and save money.
We also use leftover tidbits in breakfast meals. This weekend I made a French toast bake with leftover bread and an overripe banana from the week. I also made pumpkin pancakes to use up some pureed pumpkin.
Reducing food waste is a fun challende for me. I love to see what I can think of!
I make a lot of fried rice and egg fritattas ( baked eggs no crust) to use up odds n ends. I will also take weird combos of food to work with me for lunch...I throw an apple in with my weird lunches and call it good!
Egg Fritatta Base
Glass pie plate: sprayed with pam
I MIX THIS IN THE PIE PLATE
6 eggs--scramble with a whisk
Add: bits of plain yogurt, sour cream, milk or cream , cottage cheese 3 T maybe?
Add: a little cheese any kind
Add: bits of veggies and protein ( I love sauteed spinach garlic and onion)
Mix again.
top with fresh pepper and any herbs you feel like
bake: 350 for 25-28 mins....makes four generous servings for any meal, breakfast lunch or dinner....reheats well too
I do this a lot for lunch-- just put a bunch of different odds and ends that might go together into a pyrex or salad container.
Probably about once every week or two we just have random leftovers for dinner. We don't have a very large refrigerator, so we often have to finish things off before we can fit a new set of leftovers in.
We used to be good about freezing half of a large batch instead of eating it for multiple meals in a row, but since the kids have gotten older they just don't eat the reheated freezer stuff even if they ate it just fine when it was first made, so I end up having it for lunch multiple meals in a row or it just sits half eaten in the fridge for a while if it's hard to take to work like soup.
Author John Scalzi is semi-famous for putting random leftovers into a tortilla and calling it a burrito! There's even a joke twitter account parody of them @ScalziBurrito .
A friend had told me about using cooked rice as the basis for a crust, and then making a sort of pie with whatever leftovers she had. Some of the online recipes I just found-- thank you for the reminder of this leftover possibility!-- had cheese, but not all.
The "bowl" leftover meals described in the comments are pretty much what I order from the menu at my favorite breakfast place for $12+
Potatoes, cheese, peppers, onions, fresh herbs, meat if you have some, all served with an egg on top. Yum!
Our two "use up the leftover" meals are frittatas and stir fry. I love stir fry. I usually start with shredded cabbage (while it's more frugal to shred your own I buy it because I'm less likely to do this if I have to face the mess shredding cabbage always makes) and then toss in leftover veggies and meats. I concoct a sauce from soy sauce or coconut aminos, fish sauce, sesame oil and rice wine vinegar. I keep frozen knobs of fresh ginger in the freezer to add to the flavor with garlic and onions. It's fast and easy. I can make rice in 15 minutes in my electric pressure cooker to accompany the meal and since there are already a lot of veggies we serve a side of melon or other fresh fruit.
For breakfast or lunch I sometimes make a savory Japanese cabbage pancake called Okonomiyaki with some of the shredded cabbage and left over veggies.
Our other family favorite when we have left over beef is to make hash with onions and potatoes and serve it with a fried egg. I really like that better than the original beef dish.
In addition to your excellent suggestions of soup, salad, and scrambled eggs to use up random bits in the fridge to avoid food waste, I would add fried rice, frittata, pasta casserole, and quiche.
What a helpful post and enlightening comments! Thank you, Kristen and everyone!
Right?!?
I love this post and am very inspired -- and your mash-ups look beautiful and healthy. Not a great or creative cook, but these suggestions seem like even I could do them. We 're pretty good about eating leftovers in their pure, original state, but shy away from strange and "magic'd" combos, as someone up thread said. Will work on this. Thanks to all!
I mean I am not a great or creative cook -- you all sound amazing :)!
You have freed us all apparently! I too used up “inappropriate” stuff together - sometimes at “inappropriate” meals! Who says you can’t have ???? At breakfast?
I would never have admitted having **** with #### , but now I don’t have to hide my adventurous plates of “stuff” any more. I’m free at last, free at last!
Honestly, it never occurred to me NOT to cook and eat this way. I mean, you eat what you have, right? This whole idea of having to make these professional-quality meals, beautifully served ("You eat with your eyes first!") every night is just crazy to me. We are not professionals. We do not need to have photograph-ready food every night. We just need to EAT, and eat in a healthy way. I think the Food Network has a lot to answer for . . .
Leftover cooked vegetables make great pureed soups! I use a ratio of about one cup of solids to one cup of liquids (which could be milk, soup base + water, broth made from rotisserie chicken bones, leftover salted cooking water from said vegetables or from pasta, etc.). Whirl in the blender for 30 to 40 seconds, and season to taste.
My lunch today included a cold beet soup I made in the Vitamix: diced beets, beet cooking water (salted for flavor), a blob of sour cream, and some dried dill stirred in after blending. Yum. Once I made pureed soup out of leftovers from a kale and sweet potato dish with Thai peanut dressing. SO good.
Around here, store-bought pureed soups in cartons, like Pacific and Imagine brands, tend to cost about $1 per serving. Making my own from leftovers is a bargain.
I'm late to the party, but I hope you see this one, Kristen. I made risotto tonight with shallots, asparagus and mushrooms. I have a half gallon of half and half left over from an event to use up, so a number of creamy dishes have crossed our palates lately. I even added some to a batch of Thai Chicken Soup a few days ago. Which brings me to the subject at hand. I added the last bowlful of Thai Chicken Soup when the risotto was in the finishing stages. Sounds gross, but it turned out great! I'm so happy that I made a huge batch because leftover risotto is the bomb for a quick heat-and-eat lunch at home.
P.S. I see you modified the comment posting instructions! Thank you!
My almost 13 year old son just went on a massive growth spurt. Leftovers, what are those?
Yesterday DH made a second batch of dinner after the kids finished the first and then they finished that too.
I love this way of cooking! Years ago, at the beginning of our frugal journey, I realized that I could also google 2-3 random ingredients and instantly would find recipes. I highly recommend trying it!