How to Use Leftovers and Prevent Food Waste

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You’ve just made a 5-star meal complete with an amazing main dish, perfectly matching sides, and a show-stopping dessert to finish it all off. Everyone loved it, but now you have a fridge full of leftovers. It all tasted so wonderful and fresh the day you prepared the meal, but then what happened?

Sometimes people are reluctant to eat the same thing twice in a row, and sometimes you don’t have enough leftovers to make another full meal for your family.

You don’t want to just throw them out, but what to do? Even the best home cooks sometimes run out of ideas or motivation when faced with a bunch of leftovers.

Why does leftover food go to waste?

None of us purposely let our food go to waste. So why does it happen so often? There are many possibilities: buying more food than your family will use before it goes bad; using only part of your food instead of all of it; cooking more than you need for a meal; failing to store food properly; and unwillingness to eat leftovers are just a few reasons.

The first two reasons have to do with planning ahead. Let’s take a look at how better planning can help save food from being wasted.

Don’t buy too much food.

This sounds kind of crazy, doesn’t it? I’m envisioning someone going to the grocery store and loading up her cart full of fresh fruits and vegetables, then going home and realizing she can’t eat all of it before it rots.

But that would never happen, right? Maybe not to that extreme, but many of us do find ourselves with limp or rotting produce once in a while, despite our best efforts.

If something is on a good sale, it’s hard not to buy it, even if you don’t have a specific plan for it. Now, I’m not saying you should never take advantage of sales on perishable food, but do so prudently: come up with a plan to use or preserve the food within a week BEFORE you load up your cart.

In most cases, you can freeze or can perishable food if you won’t be able to eat it all before it goes bad. Just make sure you have the freezer space or canning jars before getting too excited over that super sale on peaches!

Prevent food waste when cooking

Do you find yourself throwing out a lot of food scraps? Carrot and beet tops, potato and onion peels, and skin or bones from meat or fish are all commonly thrown out.

Composting is great, but you can go a step further. Before you pitch them, think about how you might be able to use these nutrient-rich parts of your protein and produce.

The leafy green parts of many root or stem vegetables are edible, and are a great source of many vitamins and minerals. Rhubarb is one notable exception: the large leaves of this plant are so high in oxalic acid that they’re poisonous to humans. But beets, carrots, celery, chard, and many others are perfectly safe and may be prepared in a variety of ways.

Instead of tossing the skin and bones from meat or fish, save it and make bone broth! Broth or stock is nutrient dense, and prevents food waste at the same time. I keep a bag in my freezer for odds and ends of carrots, onions, and celery. When I have a chicken carcass or some bones for making broth, I dump in the frozen vegetable parts and water to cover, and let the pot simmer all day.

Love Food Hate Waste has many more ideas about how to use every bit of your food and prevent food waste.

Don’t cook more food than you will eat

Sometimes, cooking extra food is a great idea-when you plan for it. But if you routinely have a serving or so of each meal left over, that’s where the problem starts. The leftovers get wrapped up carefully, then gradually pushed to the back of the fridge, right?

I’ll be the first to say that it’s hard to know exactly how much your family will eat. It varies by the day, by the meal, by their moods… and what about unexpected dinner guests? Also, you can’t just alter every recipe to produce the exact amount of servings you need.

Okay, so you can’t plan an exact amount of food for each meal. But this is still worth thinking about if you’re trying not to waste food.

Here’s an example. If you know there’s a particular meal that your family likes, but it’s hard to use the leftovers, then maybe you should plan that meal for when you have guests over.

Or if you’re trying a new recipe and you’re not sure how your family will take it, consider halving the recipe and making it in an 8×8″ pan instead of a 13×9″ pan. You can always make the full amount next time if they like it. Better to end up with an empty pan than half a pan full of food nobody liked!

Learn how to store food properly

Does your lettuce go limp before you can use it all up? You might be storing it the wrong way. If you tend to store all of your fruits and vegetables the same way, there’s a good chance some of them are aging prematurely. Take a little time to learn the best storage technique for each one, and you will be surprised at how much longer your produce stays fresh.

In the limp lettuce example above, try putting it in a bowl of cold water for 15 minutes to crisp up the leaves again. Then wrap the head of lettuce in damp paper towels and place it in a plastic bag in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator. Wrapped this way, it should stay fresh for weeks.

Here are some more ideas for keeping your produce fresh longer:

• How to store strawberries so they last longer (The Spruce Eats).

• Jill at The Prairie Homestead has some great ideas for storing root vegetables when you don’t have a root cellar.

• Lori at Our Heritage of Health explains how to store apples all winter long.

How to eat leftovers

Most people don’t have a problem reheating their favorite foods or finishing off last night’s fruit salad. But some leftovers just don’t look very appealing. Others are strongly flavored, and don’t blend well when you add them to soups or casseroles. What are some tips for learning to eat your leftovers?

• Sooner is better than later. The longer something sits in your refrigerator, the less likely you are to find it appealing. Try to eat leftovers within a day or two after you make the meal.

• It’s okay to ditch the sauce. If you have leftover meat or vegetables that are covered with a highly seasoned sauce, rinsing the sauce off makes it easier to use in some other dish with different flavors. (I know, I know, this involves wasting a little food; but if that sauce is keeping you from eating the leftovers, it’s better to save some food rather than none.)

• Make them pretty. Designate one meal per week for reheating leftovers. You can lay them all out in fancy dishes, line them up buffet style, whatever floats your boat.

Cook with leftovers in mind

One of the barriers I sometimes face with using leftovers is that the leftovers are unexpected, which means I don’t have a plan for them. Now, I like to plan my meals once a week, so that I don’t have to worry about what’s for dinner every day.

I usually leave a blank space in my meal plan for leftovers at least one day per week. Sometimes, however, I have more leftovers that I expect. But if I’m strictly following my meal plan, those leftovers just get pushed to the back of the refrigerator and forgotten.

To prevent this from happening, I try to plan my meals with leftovers in mind. If you know roughly how much your family eats at mealtime, you should have a good idea of whether or not there will be leftovers from a particular meal.

That’s great to keep in mind, but you can take it a step further and actually plan for those leftovers. For example, if you’re roasting a chicken with vegetables for Sunday dinner, why not plan for chicken soup later in the week?

When you plan ahead for leftovers, you can estimate which foods you’re likely to have left over. This is important so that you can make sure to have the right ingredients on hand to turn those leftovers into another appetizing meal.

Leftovers in the Freezer

If you end up with a lot of leftovers after a meal, think about whether or not you can freeze them for later. Many people like to cook extra so they will have enough to freeze for another meal later. I know I definitely appreciate the days when all I have to do for supper is pull a meal out of the freezer and heat it!

Some meals that freeze well are: chili, soups and stews, casseroles like shepherd’s pie or lasagna, taco meat, seasoned (or not) shredded chicken, beef, or pork, and cooked beans. Those are all foods I find very handy to have in the freezer!

Another way your freezer can help with leftovers is by storing those odds and ends you’re not sure what to do with.

Instead of keeping a half cup of cooked veggies in the fridge until you get around to using them (a.k.a. until you forget about them and find the container a month later), why not designate a freezer bag or sturdy container for leftovers in the freezer?

You can slide bits of leftover meat, vegetables, and cooked grains into it when you don’t have a specific plan to use them. When the bag is full, thaw the contents and make soup or a casserole.

Conclusion

If this sounds overwhelming, just start slowly. Using leftovers instead of throwing them out can become a habit, but it might take some getting used to.

Meal planning can be a big help when you’re trying to form this new habit. I have some great resources and ideas for meal planning here!

If you would like some specific suggestions for how to cook with leftovers, see this list of ideas for transforming your leftovers.

I hope these ideas inspire you to be more creative in how you think about leftovers!

~Kimberly