“We need to go grocery shopping.” “We need groceries.” ” We have to go shopping.” These are very frequent litanies at our house. YA occasionally cooks (and she’s fine at it) but she prefers quicker meals. This means she doesn’t recognize foodstuffs that aren’t already “meals”. She can open the cabinet, see a can of black beans, a can of corn and a can of Rotel tomatoes sitting next to each other and not see a meal.
In my reality, we hardly have room in the fridge, in the freezer or the cabinets for more food. But if I say, I can make ________ from the cans in the cabinet or frozen items, she is often not interested. So we go round and round and neither of us ever “wins”.
She left for London last Thursday and I decided that I would spend her 12 days out of town eatting only what is in the house. With the exception of milk, I am not going to purchase any food. Unfortunately it’s not much of a stretch goal.
However after a few days, I realize that I’m running up against a “quirk” of mine. My mom was born in 1932 and so her formative years were depression years and she came out of them with a “waste not, want not” attitude. When I was growing up, we had what she lovingly called “goulash” at least once a week – any leftovers saved up and then lumped together when there was enough for a pot-ful. I don’t remember any of them being ghastly and will admit that as an adult, I have more than once combined leftovers.
BUT, this waste not/want not that she passed to me has morphed over the years into a strong desire to “finish” things. When I eat the last slice of bread or heat up the last helping of a dish, it makes me feel good, almost lofty. This can unfortunately lead me to finishing things when I don’t really need to. No need to eat three slices of bread because there are only three slices left in the bag… that kind of thing.
While YA is gone, I’m having to balance my desire to finish things with my desire to eat only stuff that is in the house. So far so good. Chips/cheese/salsa. Made a panzanella with a baguette and shaved parmesan I found in the fridge (and tomatoes and basil from the garden). 11 jars of tomato sauce for the freezer. Ate the last English muffin from Breadsmith. Got through the pesto pasta with tomatoes that I made right before she left. Discovered chocolate, marshmallows and graham crackers – smores. A couple of smoothies so far using lots of frozen fruit. I harvested the rosemary and it smelled to good that instead of freezing it all, I made a focaccia.
This is all a lot of fun so far. We’ll see how the next week goes!
How do you feel about leftovers?
Trail Baboon 
OT. Blevins Reminder….
Sunday, September 15
2 p.m.
Minnehaha Park (near Sea Salt Restaurant)
Kathy & Jim’s as back-up
Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
&
The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman)
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Ooh, I have some of the same dynamics going on here, VS. I have made several “quite good” concoctions from all the little partial containers in the fridge. I remember cutting out an article from a 1972 Sunset Magazine about the art of Réchauffé.
Garrison once said that in Lake Wobegon, the women would on Saturday make dinner from all the week’s leftover containers – called it the Parade of the Tupperware.
Leftovers are my lifeline – I purposely make enough for two or three meals whenever possible. If necessary I freeze some of it (but then you MUST label it.) Tonight will probably be a chili from two kinds of leftover tomato sauce, half a can of leftover kidney beans… combined with sautéed fresh garden tomatoes and zukes, and I might find some leftover sausage in the freezer.
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Rise and Eat It All, Baboons,
I am also on the Barb In Rvtn plan. I make extra stuff so I can have leftovers in the fridge, then I do not cook every day. Soup, pasta salads, and some “hotdishes” or something like Jambalaya are just meant to sit there while flavors blend with one another. Some things I freeze as extra servings, as well. That is handy.
Speaking of freezer management (were we speaking of that?) I found a gallon of frozen tomatoes from the bumper crop of last year which I left behind. I also have many tomatoes on the counter, so it is time to make marinara sauce to freeze. That is so good in mid-winter. This morning at water aerobics the person next to me said her DIL bought a bushel of tomatoes, then made many quarts of canned, specialty marinara (red wine or chocolate were the two she mentioned). That inspired the plan for marinara.
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VS and Barbara, I can relate to this as well! My parents were Depression Era kids as well. (VS – My daughter lives with me. I think our daughters seem are a similar age and I can relate to much of what you write about.) She came back from a trip last week and said to me, “what did you eat?” because I had not gone grocery shopping while she was gone. I said, ” I ate leftovers!” She made a face!
It’s good to know there are people like you out there!
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are you a known baboon or someone poking their head in?
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hello and welcome either way
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I was wondering, too, who that might be.
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We, too, cook as though the local college football team is coming over for dinner. I find I am becoming increasingly concerned with not wasting food, but not to the extent that we concoct what I call “glop” from disparate dishes. We just freeze a lot of leftovers until we can’t fit any more in, then spend a couple weeks just reheating things from the freezer.
We have harvested and frozen all the green beans we will need for winter, but the vines are still producing (we grow pole beans) so any more that come will go to the food pantry. We also have a ton of chard that we need to pick. We have five Savoy cabbages that are coming along nicely now that we bunny-proofed them. One will go into a German dish called Wirsing-Zwiebelkuchen mit Speck, which is sort of like a pizza with a yeast raised crust and cabbage, onions and bacon on top with a sour cream and egg filling. That will use one cabbage. We have yet to plan for the other four.
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Chickens love leftovers… just saying.
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Ya know, some neighbors a couple of doors down have chickens – maybe I should ask them if they’d like some of our scraps and leftovers!
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Oh I bet they would
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aint nobody here but us chickens
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It’s difficult cooking for one or two without incurring leftovers. I could, I suppose, cut recipes down and I sometimes do, but the fact is I like having leftovers. Leftovers are my meal of choice for late breakfast/lunch. The trick is to intersperse leftover-producing meals with ones that don’t tend to have excess so that I don’t end up with multiple containers of various leftovers at the same time.
I seldom recombine disparate leftovers into new combinations. Even if they are compatible, odds are the result won’t be as good as either of the component dishes were, and the recombination process will leave the new dish overcooked.
When I make soups or stews or chili, it’s with the intent of making enough to portion some off for the freezer. I don’t regard those as leftovers.
If the “leftovers” happen to be small amounts of various vegetables too few to cook by themselves, I have several recipes—stir fries and the like— that can accommodate any assortment.
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Yes, and I’m sure that’s how lots of soups got created in the first place – using bits of things that needed using.
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Like other baboons, I intentionally make certain meals in large enough portions to have leftovers. This is especially true if I’m making something that is labor intensive, takes a long time to cook, or simply tastes better the next day. This is true of some soups and stews; ratatouille is a good example. Though we’re both retired, and it doesn’t really matter when the more ambitious cooking takes place, it tends to cluster on weekends during the farmer’s market season. It’s nice to have a day or two where all you have to do is make a salad and cook some noodles or couscous to supplement the previous day’s main dish.
Combining various dishes into what Renee calls “glop” doesn’t appeal to me, either, though I’ll confess I’ve done it on occasion. It confuses my taste buds.
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I get concerned about the somewhat random expiry dates on many food products and the waste they engender. Son throws out perfectly good food if the Use By or Expiry Date is close.
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YA is the same. We’ve had many conversations about this because she would literally throw out anything the minute it comes up to its use-by date. I’ve tried to get her to do more research on what these dates really mean but so far no luck.
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let her throw out all her stuff
leave the stuff you pay for alone
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Ha. I’ll let you try to enforce that.
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easy
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We are all of one mind. Anything I cook results in leftovers because I’m the only one here. I freeze things too, but I don’t have a lot of freezer space.
I had a lot of lentils that needed to be used up, so I concocted something with brown rice, lentils, onion, carrots, bell peppers and celery. I used Thai curry paste to season it. It made six small meals which were easy to package up in glass containers. I put three of them in the freezer. It’s an easy, quick lunch.
I also made some black bean burgers using sweet potatoes. I peeled and roasted two medium sweet potatoes until they were tender, then put them in a pan with some black beans, lime juice, onion powder, cumin, and chipotle powder. I used the potato smasher to smash the mixture down in the pan. A few lumps didn’t matter. I had some rolled oats ready in case the mixture wasn’t stiff enough to make patties, but they weren’t needed. It made several patties, and I froze half of them.
I call my cooking style “catastrophe cooking.”
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These sound really good!
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I cook for one and should cook for leftovers but somehow seldom do. A pasta dish or soup I do, which only last two meals. I budget, just to know roughly where I am at. My grocery budget is sometimes overspent, not often, and sometimes hardly touched. But I shop at Aldi and buy quantities of meat to freeze, which explains most of that. Last night I took out a thick breast half. It is still partly frozen. I could force it. I could go get something. I am often at this point. Then the effort of going out seems too much. I have lunch meat, cheese and bread. The taste of food does not matter much anymore. Part of why I have slowly lost so much weight.
Clyde
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Leftover pea soup is a wonderful thing. Each time you heat it up the peas soften and dissolve a little more and the soup becomes more creamy and infused with flavor.
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lasagna and goulashy stuff too
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i am the only one who eats my stuff other than holiday meals. it generally comes to be a big tupperware affair by the time im done and has morphed into bowls days later going italian with one chines with the other
potato bean veggie bean pasta onion garlic mushroom with lots of greens ends up over noodles or lentils or wrapped in a tortilla or combined with mayo /yogurt cream cheese as a dip, dressing potato topping
fur is when it goes out so tomato sauce and vinegar can keep it alive in the fridge to birth new variations for extended periods
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My iPad doesn’t let me “Like”, and we’ll see if I can get signed in here – Love “fur is when it goes out” – here, too, mostly.
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