How We Save Money on Groceries #5 | We eat our leftovers.

I think that this is an important part of being frugal. When I fail to use up my leftovers and end up throwing them away, it’s like throwing money away.

Instead of eating the leftovers (which I’ve already paid for!), I eat other new food, which basically means I’m buying twice as much food as I would need to if I just used the leftovers.

While I’m not as good at this as I’d like to be, I know from talking to other people that I am also not as bad at this as I could be. Here are some of the things that I do to maximize how well we use our main dish leftovers.

I pack leftovers in my husband’s lunch.

This is a very effective way to use up leftovers, so long as you have a cooperative lunch-taker(and so long as the lunch-taker has some means of heating up food!). My husband is blessed to have a microwave and a toaster oven at work, so he’s well-equipped for most any type of leftover.

To minimize the amount of time that it requires to pack leftovers, I generally do that task after dinner when I’m putting leftovers away. I just package a single serving out of whatever leftovers we have and put it in the fridge, and then it’s ready to grab in the morning.

If things go according to my plan, we end up with one lunch’s worth of leftovers. But if we have more than that(and that happens more often than not), then there are a couple of other things that I do.

I eat leftovers for lunch.

To be honest, this is not my most favorite thing to do.

I’d really just rather eat bread, yogurt, and fruit.

However, throwing away food is also not my most favorite thing to do, so I’ve been learning to suck it up and eat whatever we have left. I’m almost always home at lunch, which means I have a full kitchen at my disposal, and that means I can heat up leftovers in any ways imaginable(leaving me without excuse!).

I eat leftovers for dinner.

I’m not hard core enough to eat something for dinner, then for lunch the next day, and then also for dinner (I like variety too much for that!), but if there’s a single serving of some other kind of leftover or some leftover ingredients that can be made into something els e(like a salad), I will sometimes eat that for dinner instead of whatever I’m making for everyone else. It’s worth noting, though, that this strategy is only effective if you reduce the quantity/size of the new dinner you’re preparing. 😉

If we have a lot of leftovers, I freeze them for another meal.

Obviously, I only do this when the meal is freezer-friendly. We don’t usually have this many leftovers, and a lot of things I make are not freezer friendly, so I don’t use this strategy a lot, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

As an aside, a lot of the use-up-your-leftovers-by-making-something-new-and-exciting ideas that I read haven’t ended up being that useful for me.

It seems that these tips generally rely on you having cooked a rather simple meal the night before (meat and potatoes or something like that).

Since I rarely cook like this, transforming my leftovers into a new dish is nigh onto impossible. If you tend to cook like that, though, then it would be worth considering what you might be able to do with your leftover chicken breasts or steaks or mashed potatoes.

I do occasionally have some ingredients sitting around in my fridge (for instance, I sometimes have some grilled chicken leftover from when I make panini), and when that happens, I find that oftentimes these things can be added to a salad, which makes eating leftovers pretty painless for me.

Another thing that has worked well for me when I have leftover pasta is to combine it with whatever random vegetables I need to use and mix it with some Italian dressing. It requires no cooking, and makes a tasty lunch.

Leftovers from side dishes aren’t such a problem. Nine times out of ten, the only leftovers we have are breads. I’ve mentioned before that we usually have a main dish plus a fruit or vegetable and bread. I’m pretty good at guessing how much we’ll need in the way of fruits and vegetables, so those are rarely leftover.

And bread is very easy to use up, since we enjoy eating that for breakfast and lunch (and also, I discovered that I can make croutons out of bread!).

Side dish leftovers like a piece of fruit, a bowl of brown rice, or a leftover piece of bread make good snacks too.