Where do you stand on leftovers?

[catherine]

I don't know whether this falls under "Food & Recipes," "Frugality," or "Environment.

Do you use leftovers?

When my brother and I went to visit our other brother in MN in the summer, we were talking about using up the previous nights dinner that night and my SIL said "J doesn't eat leftovers." And I asked my brother, "You don't?" and he made a "Yuck!" face.

This week we are in NJ helping my son with the 2 boys while his wife is on a business trip, and they also tend not to eat leftovers.

DH and I definitely try to eat everything, and incorporate small bits of leftovers into the next night's dinner, or a soup. But I know that a lot of people don't eat leftovers--do you?

I follow Paul Hawken's Project Drawdown about how much carbon is involved in everything and how we can mitigate climate change by taking actions, either on an industrial scale or an individual scale. They have found that food waste is the biggest impact on climate change in terms of gigatons of carbon it's responsible for. That's one reason I try not to waste food, but the main reason is wasting food is wasting money.

What do you think?

https://drawdown.org/solutions/reduced-food-waste

[Tradd]

It depends what the leftovers are. Leftover hot pasta of any kind? Haven’t liked it since I was a kid. Leftover pasta salad is some thing else. Very yummy. Thanksgiving and Christmas leftovers are great. Or ham at Easter. Leftover soup is OK.

[early morning]

First world problem, right? YES. We have very few leftovers. We eat them when we do. I actually love leftovers and try to have them but....many times, someone generally just eats everything at the table. *sigh* Growing up, it never occurred to us that ANYONE wouldn't want leftovers. If something was a bit off, it went to the hounds, and veggie scraps etc went to the horses or the compost, but actual FOOD - we ate it. We grew it, preserved it, hunted it, butchered it, and ate it. When you put a lot of effort into food, you think twice about wasting it, and that philosophy has stuck with me.

[catherine]

We grew it, preserved it, hunted it, butchered it, and ate it. When you put a lot of effort into food, you think twice about wasting it, and that philosophy has stuck with me.

So true!!! I have found that to be true with all my homegrown fruits and veggies. They're almost like my children.

[iris lilies]

We eat all leftovers. I purposely make dinners some evenings with extra portions to be frozen for later eating. It’s very rare that anything goes in the back of our refrigerator and goes bad. Maybe that happens a couple times a year, and in those cases, it still may be good enough to give it to our dog.

we tried the new “Chinese “menu at a restaurant in the village, and it was simply horrible. I cannot emphasize how BAD it was. So I didn’t eat it, but I brought it home for our dog who had it as topping for several meals.

[ApatheticNoMore]

The not eating leftover stuff sounds batty. So probably half my meals are leftovers (or maybe 1/3 some are just easy stuff like eating some yogurt, no cooking there). Like do people just LOVE cooking ALL THE TIME? Every single meal? Because that's what not eating leftovers entails. It sounds utterly exhausting to me! A meal takes about an hour to make any way you slice it, you do the math. Of course maybe the people complaining about leftovers aren't the ones doing the cooking, in which case they have no right to an opinion

I will admit what gets kind of hard is meal planning, like I'm bad at estimating how many meals of leftovers I will have from a meal, and so sometimes buy too much food as I just end up eating leftovers. I plan not to waste food too, but I realize I have some weaknesses, like buying too much lettuce and then I don't even make salads, I just eat leftovers.

[Tradd]

Some leftovers just don’t take nice to me.

[catherine]

Like do people just LOVE cooking ALL THE TIME? Every single meal? Because that's what not eating leftovers entails. It sounds utterly exhausting to me! A meal takes about an hour to make any way you slice it, you do the math. Of course maybe the people complaining about leftovers aren't the ones doing the cooking, in which case they have no right to an opinion

It occurred to me that this is the reason that I see pictures of my brother and SIL in restaurants all the time. At least twice a week. My SIL has a thing about going to a restaurant, taking a picture of the meal, then having the server take a picture of her and my brother holding hands across the table, and then posting it. Some people have travelogues--she has dine-alogues. Now I'm thinking, of course she doesn't want to cook every single night, so she probably demands going out 2-3 times a week.

[Alan]

We're having leftovers tonight. Green beans, potatoes and ham from the day before yesterday and a couple of copycat, homemade sausage, egg and cheese McMuffins tried for the first time yesterday.

We try to use up all leftovers in a timely manner but sometimes fail to get to them before they become questionable in the fridge. We also throw away a lot of lettuce, I love salads but don't have one every day and I have a low tolerance for veggies on the verge of going bad.

[pinkytoe]

If we have leftovers, we tend to eat them for lunch the next day and then make something light for dinner. But yes, we always eat whatever is left one way or another. As an example, DH made an arroz con pollo dish last night and there was a lot of the rice mixture left. This morning, he reheated the rice and topped it with a fried egg for his breakfast meal.