Frugal Pantry Tuesday – Saving Money by Using Leftovers
leftovers Picture taken by Muffet @ Flickr.com
My husband does not like the word “leftovers”. When we first got married, he refused to eat “leftovers”. I came from a family that believed in using leftovers and would change the dishes into something else altogether. It was not an uncommon to think that Mom had been cooking all day creating a new dish when the reality was that she used the leftovers from the night before.
Today’s Frugal Pantry Tuesday is going to be about using leftovers to create a new meal.
Yesterday you cooked a huge roast, complete with the potatoes and carrots. You could rewarm the leftovers and have the same meal as last night, but you just really were hungry for something different. You don’t want to just leave the roast in the fridge to be forgotten. So you look in the pantry and this is what you see:
A bag of egg noodles
A jar of beef gravy
A can of tomatoes
A can of green peas
A can of Veg-All
A can of cream of mushroom soup
Crackers
A can of green chiles
A small can of black olives
BBQ sauce
A bag of chips, and,
A loaf of bread
In the fridge you have:
Sour cream
Eggs
A rollout pie crust
What would you make?
Now I don’t know about you but I see a lot of possibilities there. Tonight though we want something simple and not quite as heavy as last night’s meal. I would take the roast, chip it up, add the BBQ sauce and have BBQ sandwiches served on loaf bread and chips.
Using leftovers can save you money. Now I’m not talking about keeping leftovers for a long period of time (unless you have put them in the freezer – make you sure you date them if you do!). I’m talking about using leftovers within a couple of days of first cooking them.
Does my hubby eat leftovers now? He will eat leftovers if they are used within two days of the original cooking. He will not eat frozen leftovers.
We would love to hear from you. Leave us a message and let us know what you would make from this week’s Frugal Pantry Tuesday.
Till next time,
JT Locke
The Frugal Housewife
I don’t mind left overs at all. Some stuff even tastes better the day after, don’t you think? Like chicken noodle soup. Or crockpot pot roast, beef stew etc.
Personally I think homemade chili tastes better the next day!!!
I would make beef pot pie. Left over beef roast cubed, beef gravy, Veg-All and pie crust.
If you had potatoes or instant potatoes you could make shepard’s pie (left over roast cubed, beef gravy, canned peas, about a tsp of worchestershire sauce. Make mashed potatoes and spoon over top of meat mixture and bake.
I love using leftovers, but with a teenage son, sometimes it’s hard to keep those leftovers to make the next day’s meal.
Due to my work schedule, I LIVE off of leftovers. Waaay too many possibilities to list with the items you’ve suggested. I’ve been known to get very creative when combining leftovers. As has been said already, some things truly are better the second time around.
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I don’t cook . My husband cooks. But he’s the one who does not eat leftovers that are 2 days old even when they are stored in the fridge. But now these economic hard times looming over us, he is now convinced to re-use or re-cook leftovers in some other ways. Like if we have meatloaf tonight, he’ll make it the left-over meat as toppings for spaghetti the next day. Or if he make baked salmon today, tomorrow he’ll mix it with pancit (a Filipino dish).
Left overs?? What’s that? LOL! With my husband’s appetite, and my daughter and granddaughter living with me (temporarily), we don’t have many left overs. If I did have the above leftovers, I would slice up the beef, use the mushroom soup and the beef gravy and make my own recipe of Beef Goulash. After cooking all the ingredients together, I would stir in about half cup or sour cream, pour over the cooked egg noodles and there ya go!
Thanks for this game, I love it!!!
I’d take the soup, gravy and some of the sour cream and use the roast and egg noodles to make a beef stroganoff dish
The simplest solution would be to cut the beef and vegetables into very small pieces, add the can of tomatoes and some water, re-season and serve up some vegetable beef soup with crackers. If I also added the noodles, it could become beef noodle soup. My husband loves left-overs and most of the time he doesn’t even know that he is eating left-overs. I save everything, including the water in which I cook vegetables and pasta. These are great additions to the soup that I make at the end of the week. Great website!
I am the leftover queen. My husband, and my son think they don’t like leftovers. Ha! As long as I keep them out of the kitchen, and they don’t see what I’m doing, I’m a genius! That left over chicken from Tuesday, will be barbecue chicken sandwiches for after school snack.