Tired of Wasting Food? Best Tips to Utilize Leftovers!
Raise your hand if you like leftovers? I’ve got my hand up super high I am a total love because I use them for lunches and I totally love a hot meal so using the leftovers gives me an opportunity for that at lunch time.
I also tend to save all the little scraps from various meals and just warm them up together and have a little of this and a little of that. Almost like a shmorgusboard
Let’s dive into some of my tips for the best ways to use leftovers;
Hi, friends, it's Andrea with another episode of Adventures In Feeding My Fam. I know you guys have heard me use the phrase planned overs. And I love this phrase because it just shows that there really is a purpose for my leftovers. There is a plan for them. Today I'll provide some tips how you can make the best use of leftovers. And I think this is super fun. You'd be surprised how many people ask me for these tips. So I hope this was helpful for you. You know what else is really fun. Currently, I'm in my six week group coaching. And I absolutely love it. I've been offering women a really fantastic group of women, a coaching series, and we're learning a lot about ourselves, how events in our lives have shaped our impressions about food. And that really affects how we eat and make food selections. So it sounds serious. But it's important in order to get to the root of what's causing us to cycle in and out of diet plans. And also emotionally eat. We get serious in the group. But we also have some good laughs too. And I'll be offering additional group coaching in the near future, because it just might be the most favorite thing that I do. I absolutely love it. And I love the energy that the group brings together. So keep your ears peeled. And I suggest joining my email list so you can be one of the first people to find out when the next series of group coaching begins. The link will be in the show notes. adventures and feeding my fam is a weekly podcast discussing the challenges and fun around feeding your family healthy meals. I'm Andrea Heyman, and I've been a registered dietitian for over 25 years. So I know the importance of good nutrition. But I'm also a mom of three so I understand the challenges and humor that comes along with trying to make this happen. In this podcast, I'll share my tips, tricks and menus, but also share the stories food prep failures that come along the way to interview guests. We'll discuss family food traditions, how to strengthen bonds around the family table, as well as their favorite family recipes. There isn't one right way to feed your family.
02:19 But there are countless
Andrea Heyman 02:20 stories, you can take bits and pieces and learn from all of them. Raise your hand if you like leftovers, I've definitely got my hand super high, um total in love with leftovers because I use them for lunches. And I really like a hot meal for lunch. So using leftovers from the previous night's dinner gives me an opportunity for that hot meal at lunch. And I also tend to save all the little scraps from various meals. So I'll give you an example today at lunchtime, I opened 1234 I think four or five Tupperware containers that had little bits and pieces of food that were leftovers from previous nights of the week. I put them all together, I had to warm some somewhere cold. But I had this amazing smorgasbord of leftover food. And I absolutely love to do that. And enjoy meals that way. So let's dive in. Like I said, a lot of you guys asked me for tips on how to use leftovers. And so let's get to some specifics here. So number one, when you're packing up food, do it really smartly. If you've got enough leftover food from a meal to use for an entire family meal on another evening, consider freezing the entire meal in a big batch, so that you can save it for another day. Otherwise, when you pack up your food, pack it into individual servings, so that various family members can take them for lunches in the upcoming day or days. When you are meal planning, consider how you repurpose what you're making. Can a leftover entree be used in the following night's meal? This is a pretty advanced meal planning and meal, I guess. Yeah, just meal planning technique. And I actually go over this in my monthly meal map method course which I'm currently developing. I actually had the pleasure to work with two wonderful women and kind of go through the beta testing stages and get some additional ideas for that and really just have them tell me what they need as far as to help them with meal planning. And one of the things they said was that they wanted more advice and more ways to use leftovers. So in that meal planning course I go over more on how you can definitely repurpose what you're making. So consider having leftovers night for dinner. I actually only cook six nights per week. And that means one night is a freebie night and we kind of take everything out of the fridge all the leftovers from the previous week. And we use all of that up. It's a really good way to prevent food from being wasted. And it also gives me a night off from cooking. Another really great technique is to think about the ingredients that you're making. Can those roasted vegetables that you used on Tuesday night, be used for a dish The following night, If yes, then make extra veggies so that you can streamline the prep process and make it easy particularly on that second day. So I often do this when I'm selecting grains that I'm going to be making. So I will use the same grain for a couple consecutive nights and then only make it the first night. So for example, if it's rice or quinoa, I will eat that two nights in a row but only have to make it that first night's meal. Another tip make soup literally anything can go in a soup and tastes delicious. So many vegetables that you've used for previous night's meals can easily be put in the soup, left chunky or pureed smooth to make a nice soup. And again, you know, I hate wasting food. So this is a perfect way to utilize those extra veggies. You know what I always say anything in a taco, you can literally put any leftover food into a taco and make it into a fun little hand finger type food. And if there's anything that I know that I have learned over the past is that kids love tacos and pretty much eat anything if it's in a taco. If you don't have enough leftovers to make a full complete meal, you can definitely use your meal from one night as a side dish with another meal. That's a great way to leave us leftovers. And another one of my favorite ideas is to use perhaps leftover rice and leftover vegetables, put it all together and make a fried rice. So you're kind of creating a new entire recipe from those two components that you had leftover. So I hope these tips these are really my favorite tips on how to utilize leftovers in a really efficient way. And I hope that they were super helpful for you. If you have any great ideas I would love for you to pop into the Facebook group and share with the group. If you liked this episode, please rate review and subscribe to the podcast. I'd love to hear from you. And I read all of the reviews that I get there and use that as guide for future episodes in order to know what kind of content you all are looking for and what can be most helpful for you. Until next time, take care