So I have leftovers all the time and I don’t always know what to do with them. Today I got kinda creative and made fajitas with leftover steak from last night. What do you do with them?
My husband and I usually pack leftovers for lunch. Whatever we don’t take with us for lunch is devoured by the teenager when he gets home from school.
With things like a bird carcass/ham bone I’ll make stock and then make soup the day after that.
Depends on what they are. Extra servings of lasagna and the like are the wife’s lunch on following days. Leftover meats are shredded, diced, sliced or otherwise used in different dishes, ala the fajitas. We usually have a container of mac & cheese, red beans and rice, etc. in the fridge available as a side dish if it didn’t get eaten for lunch.
Leave them in the fridge until they’re too old to eat, then throw them away.
Ain’t that the sad truth, at least with respect to vegetables. Now the fried chicken, ribeyes, pork chops and sauteed mushrooms all turn into a bedtime snack, usually supplemented by something from the cracker food group.
I used to freeze any good-sized portions of leftovers I had, because I became aware that I won’t eat leftovers of a meal I just ate because I’m tired of it then, but I will gladly eat them a little while later.
Soups and casseroles are your friend, too. Most meat/savoury things go together just fine; leftover potatoes and rice and meat and veggies all cook up well together. Get some onion soup mix and toss that in too, and viola, supper! The only think that doesn’t mix well is tomato-based stuff.
At our house, we leave them in the fridge until you can smell them even when the fridge door is closed; *then *we throw them out. Or compost them, for the veggies.
We go now to our kitchen computer expert, C. Colin Backsplash.
Colin, what do you do with leftovers?
“I eventually move them to the other side of the fridge where they become rightovers.”
Me too. I watch 'em fester for a couple weeks and then I don a pair of heavy-duty gloves and slop it into the trash.
Since I eat a midnight meal (I have weird hours) I frequently have leftovers for that meal. We sometimes make casseroles or soups or fajitas from leftovers, too. Some leftovers are good in sandwiches (meatloaf, steak, roast chicken, for instance). We know about how much we’ll eat in a meal, and we generally make just enough for that meal, with certain exceptions. We will make large pot roasts, several days’ worth of lasagna or manicotti or meatloaf, or roast a chicken or turkey with an eye towards leftovers. My daughter and I will frequently plan to make a roast (beef, chicken, or turkey) and then immediately start a stock base while we’re baking the roast, so that we can put the bones and fat and poultry skin in when the roast is done. The next day, the stock is sieved, and we have started the soup process.
Meatloaf can be heated up and served the next day very easily. It also makes wonderful sandwiches. We heat up lasagna or manicotti and find that it’s better the next day. Sometimes we’ll make several lasagnas or meatloafs at once, and freeze all but one of them uncooked. It doesn’t take much more time or effort to make three lasagnas while we’ve got the ingredients out, and having a backup casserole in the freezer is very comforting.
Leftover steak can be sliced thinly and warmed in a cream sauce or brown gravy and poured over rice, mashed potatoes, or noodles. Saute some mushrooms and onions in a bit of butter or oil first, add flour, let it cook, add chicken stock and thinly sliced steak, and then sour cream at the end, and you have stroganoff, suitable for serving over noodles or rice.
If we just don’t care to eat the leftovers (we tried a recipe that we didn’t like, for instance), then there’s always the cats and/or the dog, who are always eager to eat people food.
Bailey, the third dumbest dog in the world® gets most of them. When Burt, the third dumbest son in law in the world® is here, there are rarely any leftovers.
I plan to have leftovers much of the time; a roast chicken will feature in two main meals (hot roast on day 1, cold meat with chips and beans on day 2 and soup made with the stock from the bones at some point too). Leftover cooked veg will go into a quiche, leftover boiled rice can be fried up with onions and a few vegetables, and so on. If in doubt, make soup.
I luvvvves me some veggie soup, so whenever there are leftover veggies they go into a little baggie and into the freezer. When it’s soup time, I have plenty of veggies to supplement the fresh ones and give a little more color to the mix.
Mr. SCL makes wonderful lasagna, so when he makes it he makes a lot - which is packaged in single-serving portions for taking to work, etc. It never lasts long.
. . . while asking myself why the hell I’m bothering when I know we’re not going to reheat them. I guess I have that starving-children-in-Africa guilt about throwing away leftovers.
But I’m an American-- it’s my God-given right to waste food. 
I don’t cook, as a rule, except for an occasional scrambled egg, so my leftovers are the “doggie bags” from when I go out with friends.
Those usually end up being split in 2 and one comes with me to work for lunch and the other is dinner that same day
I try to plan my meals so that I do have leftovers. Fixing macaroni-and-cheese one night and tuna noodle casserole the next means that I have no more cooking that week - just reheating and doing up some veggies. I have to do two things though; I don’t like the same meal two nights in a row.
A roast will not only provide two or three dinners, but a couple of lunches as well.
My (apartment fridge) freeze is crap, so I can’t do quantities of lasagne and stuff like that.
That’s not true, actually - things like chilis and stews are better re-heated than they are freshly made.
And spaghetti sauce.
Depends on the leftovers.
Porcupines (meatballs), spaghetti, lasagne and chili are frozen into meal size batches for reheating on lazy nights. (One pot of spaghetti can make 5 or 6 meals over a couple months).
Roasts can be used for sandwiches the next day lunch or hot sandwiches the next night. Often I warm the gravy and toss in the meat (just like Grandma!). Chicken goes for sandwiches.
Mashed potatoes can be reheated (fried in butter or in the microwave to go with the hot sandwiches) or tossed in my special potato salad (another recipe from Grandma…).
Some end up sitting around till they get tossed out. I try not to do it too much, but it happens.
During winter, whatever doesn’t get eaten later (in it’s original form, or made into a sandwich) goes in the big cast-iron stove. (Along with doggie “accidents,” junk mail, and any dead rats.)