Tired of eating leftovers? Turn your odds and ends into creative meals

You're listening to LifeKit from NPR. Hey, it's Mario. When Margaret Lee was a kid, she watched her mom doing something that was a little unusual. She used to like to save takeout sauces from every restaurant. So she would have ketchup from one restaurant, barbecue sauce from another restaurant, maybe some kind of soy sauce or duck sauce from a Chinese restaurant.

After she collected a bunch of them, she would mix them all together.

And then she would use it to make a sauce for barbecue chicken, almost always barbecue chicken.

“And honestly, it was usually really good, you know.”

Years later, when Margaret and her sister wrote a cookbook called Perfectly Good Food, they dedicated it to their mom and the way she would rescue takeout sauces. Because this was a formative lesson for Margaret. It's shelter that you don't always need a recipe to make something delicious, and you could find creative ways to use up just about any ingredient in your kitchen. You have these great intentions to cook and eat the things that you're spending your money on, and especially as food costs go up that's so frustrating.

And to use it and make sure that you eat it feels very satisfying. The latest estimate from a nonprofit called refead is that the quarter of all food products in the US get dumped. And the residential food sector accounts for a big part of that, which means if you spend $200 a week on groceries and takeout, you might be throwing away the equivalent of $50 a food. But also, once you get the hang of how to use more of your food, it makes the daily chore of feeding yourself easier. Food waste in some ways is like this trendy new idea, but for many thousands of years that was just cooking.

You just used that what you had.

“On this episode of Lifegate Reporter Emily Siner is going to talk about how to make creative meals out of leftovers, out of odds and ends, and anything else you usually end up throwing away.”

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It's a typical Tuesday night of my kitchen. I opened the fridge before dinner, and through the remains of yesterday's take out a half-eaten rotisserie chicken, still on the bone, a couple of raw vegetables. And I usually end up saying something like this. Oh, there's nothing in the fridge. I don't know what to make.

But cookbook author and chef Margaret Lee has a different outlook on my sad Tuesday night fridge. To her, these odds and ends from previous meals aren't the roadblock to dinner. They are dinner. Okay, well, the bone will add flavor to a broth or a stew, and all these vegetables will work.

So, you know, maybe the potatoes go in first, and then the fresh leafy greens go in last.

And then these vegetables are left over from another meal, so they're already cooked. So I'll pop them in sometime in the middle. In other words, think of the end of one meal as the beginning of the next. That's take away one. I don't think there's almost anything in my kitchen that isn't made out of something else.

Food writer and chef Tamar Adler is the author of the Everlasting meal, which is basically a love letter to the style of cooking. The day I talked to her, she was putting together a salad for her lunch. She looked in her fridge, found like a half-eaten burrata, a burrata salad. The burrata is a soft cheese, and it kind of melted into the arugula tomatoes. I might have tossed it right then and there. But Tamar saw potential. I kind of picked the arugula off of the burrata, and then added lemon juice and olive oil to it, and mixed it really hard.

And I might remake a burrata dressing, and it won't be as good because something about it sitting all night with the little bits and pieces made it better.

“These byproducts of yesterday's meal are the foundation for today's.”

Maybe you have some leftover rice lying around. Tamar says that is the perfect start for tonight's dinner. I will fry anything with rice, into fried rice. I will, you know, saute some aromatics, so maybe some ginger garlic, onion, and then whatever other leftover bit there is. So maybe there's like a little bit of beans left.

And just because the meal is built from leftover, it doesn't mean she treats it like a second-class dish. No, she's trying to give these ingredients new life in their new form. And sort of just take the approach of making it more flavorful and crispy and then spicy and then usually adding like a squeeze of lemon. It's all about building up your arsenal of go-to recipes that are flexible enough to use up just about anything. Margaret calls them hero recipes.

For example, my house eats a lot of bread. My children love bread. I bake bread. We always have bread ends around.

So one of Margaret's hero recipes is in anything goes savory bread pudding. You throw all that leftover bread into a freezer bag and when it's full, you soak your bread in milk or cream and you add in eggs. And I like to add in all the different cheese bits that I can find from forging my fridge. And then it can take just about any other meat or vegetable that you can think of. Generally, I just saute them with maybe onions and olive oil and it makes sure everything's well seasoned.

And then you pile it all into a casserole dish and you bake it for about an hour. And it is so delicious. These hero recipes do rely on some advanced planning.

“You need to make sure you're stocked up on staples.”

Aromatics like onion and garlic are essential to building flavor. Margaret always has puff pastry in her freezer, which she uses to repurpose leftovers into a savory galette.

And she always has shelf stable essentials like rice and pasta in her cupboard. Well, I've got chicken thighs and I've got canned tomatoes and I've got pasta. So all of a sudden you have this roast chicken and tomato pasta and then you've tossed in some fresh greens and some aliams and aromatics. And then you have this relief flavor from the oil that you can just kind of forage from what you have. Another essential ingredient to have in hand is eggs. Like you can put anything in a potata and it'll be great.

So just like taking it that is like, okay, well, if I don't know what to do, I will frittatize. Or to Marsize that even easier version of this is just to cook an egg and put it on top. It has the effective making almost everything feel hardier and fancier. Whatever you make with the staples, you can set yourself up for success by making sure you cook enough to produce leftovers. I probably cook for like 68 people every single time I go in the kitchen because I can't fry rice anything if there's nothing to fry rice.

Tomorrow also recommends thinking about what you're going to do with all the leftovers before you put them away in your fridge. For example, she might chop up the ends of the parsley she used for dinner and put them on some leftover pasta and then put it in the fridge already combined. Now the next meal is halfway started. Or at the very least, she labels the leftovers with their intended use. If I had a little bit of leftover blueberries, I wouldn't say leftover blueberries.

I would say like muffins to be on Tuesday. With grated cheese, I would say like four pasta this week or like cheese runs to turn into broth. I really like doing that, assigning the destiny of the food and labeling it. This brings us to take away two, which is a very practical one. Labeling is your friend.

I always have some painters tape and a good Sharpie in my kitchen so you can label and date things.

It's a method that chefs use in restaurants, markets as, but it's equally applicable in your home. And this becomes even more important when you store food in your freezer.

“What is this brown container that I shoved to the back of the freezer six months ago?”

Is it soup? Is it cider? I have no idea. You always think you'll remember, but often you don't. Using the freezer is a whole art in itself. Margaret has her freezer bag for the ends of bread, as we talked about. She also has one for making chicken or vegetable stock.

That houses the carrot peels and the ends of onions and extra garlic cloves and chicken bones. And then there's the freezer bag for smoothies. You know, this blueberry is too squishy, mom. I can't eat this. I just stick into the freezer. This banana is too brown.

I can't eat this. I stick into the freezer. And then eventually I just put it on a blender with some yogurt and some juice. And then I make a smoothie. And then the smoothie is delicious for all ages. Even if it's made up of all the things that have been rejected in the past.

She calls it the eat me first box.

For example, you want a lemon for your cocktail. And you cut open a lemon and then you open your fridge and you realize you already had a lemon open. And I will often find like three more lemons in the back of my fridge. And the idea is that you're looking at my fridge. I'm staring at your fridge and finding all your secrets.

She sure is me. This is nothing to be ashamed of. But having an eat me first box or even an eat me first zone of your fridge can help. It makes it easy to see the half cut lemons and the open container of coconut milk. And the apple that's getting a little wrinkly, but still isn't quite ready to retire to the smoothie bag.

That's an organizational tool that I feel helps for everybody. In Tamar's fridge, her organizational tool is making sure everything is stored in her own containers. It becomes kind of a psychological trick. Blossom and I served olives at this party. And I had gotten them in a plastic kind of clamshell thing from the olive lady.

But I put them in a mason jar before I put them away. Tonight she says she'll be more likely to reach for her own jar than a plastic container that screams leftovers. Coming up, I put our chefs to the test with the ingredients that have stumped me in the past. [MUSIC] Every episode of it's been a minute, NPR's What's Happening in Culture Podcast starts by asking three questions.

Who? How? Why now? If the culture's asking it, we're talking about it. At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and indulge your cultural curiosity. Follow it's been a minute wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll break down the zeitgeistie topics that are filling your feed. I decide to put tomorrow Adler and Margaret Lee to the test.

I mean, it's not often I get to ask professional chefs for personalized food advice. So I bring a list of ingredients that I have personally thrown at many times because they've stumped me. One thing is tomato paste. So if I have a recipe with tomato paste, I buy it. I use like the one tablespoon and then the rest of it just sits there until, I guess.

“Yeah. What's like an easy thing to do with tomato paste?”

There are a lot. And then to no one's surprised, tomorrow starts rattling off a list of options. Every time you make a tomato sauce, you use something. Any kind of a marinade, like a road on chicken or whatever. All of you dressing or an olive top and odd, putting a little bit in there. Any ministerini would be very, very happy.

Fresh putter rice would be great and it would all just end up like pinky and delicious. I mean, we've probably used it up.

Right? I think we should, ultimately, this is what I do more often.

I just ignore it when it says used tomato paste. I'm like, no, I'm just going to use a tomato because I can buy one tomato. In other words, you can use tomatoes in just about anything that calls for tomato paste and vice versa. And this is such an important cooking technique that it's takeaway three. You can substitute similar ingredients for each other.

“Even without knowing a technique going, okay, what is this like that I would know what to do with?”

For example, in the case of Tamar's leftover brada salad, she looked at the cheese and thought, this is a creamy dairy product. It's a similar consistency to a thick yogurt or sour cream. I could make a dressing with sour cream, so why don't I make it with the brada? Another example courtesy of Margaret is coleslaw. It's usually made with carrots and cabbage. Carots are root vegetable. Cabbage is a hearty leafy green, maybe instead you could swap it for collards and dichon radish or something.

And that allows you to try something new. If you got something from a CSA box that you haven't used before or something that's kind of hiding in the back of your CRISPR drawer and you didn't know what to do with it. All of a sudden you had these opportunities to swap one thing out for another. You might end up with a dish that is totally different than what you expected, but equally delicious. One of the many ingredients that tends to hide in the back of my CRISPR drawer, a needle, is lettuce, because as soon as it will, I find it unappetizing.

And then I'm relieved when it turns brown enough to just throw away and then I wonder why I bought it in the first place.

So I bring this stumper to Margaret. And this is that are getting a little suspect.

“How do I know if it's good to eat and what do I do with it if it's will tea?”

We've evolved with the senses to help us make this decision. So like smelling things, the smell test is actually really pretty solid. This applies to lots of food. If it smells bad, don't eat it. But otherwise she says I could pop the lettuce into a bowl of ice water, which pumps it back up. Alternatively, instead of trying to make it as crisp as possible for a fresh salad, I could just expand my idea of how it can be prepared.

You could make stir-fried lettuce.

“This is takeaway for when and out changed the texture.”

This could look like cooking things that you might normally eat raw, like lettuce or cucumbers. It could look like pure-raying, wrinkly veggies into a soup. Or it could look like grinding down the stems of parsley or basil. They still have that same herbied taste, but the texture might be off-putting. So tomorrow turns them into an herb oil.

I'm going to chop these herbs up or just stick them in the blender with the clove of garlic and blend them up and add olive oil. And then it's just going to be my base sauce for everything. I tried this at home, and I can attest a pesto made with the stems taste exactly the same as a pesto made with the leaves. And it saved me from having to buy twice as many herbs as I need.

And so I would never throw those things out.

They're so good. You know, one might increase the lifespan of all the parts of your veggies. It's to store them with the right balance of moisture. Baby spinach that you buy in a plastic bag tends to get gooey, Marguer says, because the plastic just retains too much moisture.

So if you stick a paper towel or a kitchen cloth in there with the greens, then they'll stay fresh or much longer. So things that you notice getting soggy, you could wet wrap in a dry cloth, or things that look really dry, you could wrap in a wet cloth. And so kind of managing the right moisture and humidity for things.

Not every experiment with every ingredient is going to be successful. In fact, this is takeaway five. Cooking with leftovers should be an adventure. Like Margaret's mom throwing all the sauces together on a chicken. Not trying to achieve the exact same outcome each time.

Or tomorrow, frying rice with whatever she has in her fridge.

Going off script is essential to using up leftovers.

And that's a good thing. It ends up being this fun game where you are creating something from what seems like nothing and solving this puzzle and then you get to eat it.

“I think the more that you're creative in the kitchen and you take risks and you try new things,”

the better of a cook you become and then the more likely you are to get a delicious dish over and over again. And if it doesn't work, well, that's an adventure in its own right. I oversalted the pasta water like three nights ago and we just all had to suffer through really salty pasta. And I was like, it's so wonderful to know that we can survive eating this two salty pasta.

Now, if it's really inedible, I give you permission to toss it in order to take out tonight. So to recap, take away one, think of the end of one meal as the beginning of the next. Take away two, labeling is your friend. Take away three, substitute similar ingredients for each other. Take away four, when in doubt, change the texture.

And take away five, cooking with leftovers should be an adventure. It's kind of a game. You know, it's like your own version of chopped, but hopefully you're not having to put gummy bears in your dinner or something.

“But you know what, if you want to try it, go for it.”

That was a reporter Emily Siner. Do you love life kit? Then you need to hang out with us on the NPR app. It's the best way to catch every episode. And if you turn on notifications, we'll let you know the minute a new conversation drops.

Download the NPR app and let's keep talking. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Margaret Serrino and edited by Sylvie Douglas. Our digital editor is Malica Greb and our visuals editor is CJ Rekalan. Meghan Kane is our senior supervising editor and Lauren Gonzales is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagle and Claire Marie Schneider

Engineering support comes from Fino Lefredo. I'm Mariel Sigada. Thanks for listening. On June 11th, the globe's biggest sporting event comes to North America, the FIFA World Cup.

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but the World Cup final. I think like five times that much. The favorites, the underdogs and the Americanization of the world's game. Listen now to the Sunday Story from the Up First podcast on the NPR app.