Food thread! Favourite leftover dishes, avoiding waste, menu ideas.

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Thought I’d start a thread for everyone to post their tips and ideas on how best to use foodstuffs. Hoping it could be an easy guide as well for those who maybe aren’t so used to home cooking or using leftover foods, or understanding how best to utilise everything you have, expiry dates etc.

We have always been very conscious of food waste so we plan very carefully to use every scrap of food, it’s not hard, it’s just a skill one develops.

I’ll post some of my favourite leftover/using up bits meals and menus here and if anyone else wants to as well, please do!

I think I might turn the remains of last nights chilli into a shepherds pie as I have a couple of parsnips and potatoes in the bottom of the fridge. Not sure how popular that will be with DC as one said last night that it was too spicy and the other not spicy enough (sigh).

Am really anxious now about what will be in the meat and veg boxes my neighbour is bringing tomorrow - hopefully not too much stuff that we don't eat.

I have some ingredients that I know would make a nice pasta dish, but I don't know how to actually cook it so that it tastes as nice as it should. Can anyone talk me through it (using basic language - I won't be offended!)?

I have:
Linguine
White crab meat
Prawns
50% less fat creme fraiche
Chilli flakes
Lemon
Cherry tomatoes
(Lots of other store cupboard stuff too)

Is it literally a matter of cooking the linguine, and then stirring through the crab, prawns, chilli, lemon and creme fraiche at the end? Or more to it than that?

Dinner was lovely! Except I got a bit too enthusiastic with the harissa - the tube has been languishing for a couple of months with a tiny bit left in it and I used twice as much as I usually would because I wanted to finish it off. But I forgot that this paste was really quite hot, so the finished dish was just a little too hot for me with three lots of chilli in i!

But it all worked out ok because I reasoned that I could have a glass of wine with it to wash away the sting.

I assume the crab meat is cooked...are your prawns raw or cooked or frozen?

Oh and if they’re frozen are they raw or cooked?

Any suggestions for using up a jar of red peppers?

I just answered on the other thread but in addition you could make a dip for crisps, wedges or pita bread, or add to chilli/goulash/bean stews/chicken tray bake.

@WellTidy Here is a tasty looking recipe that matches your ingredients list.

Beautiful looking meals everyone! I love this thread. I’m attempting to post my first ever picture with this post.

This was our dinner to use up a small amount of leftover cauliflower from the curry on Saturday night and a very small broccoli. The recipe is here www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/charred-cauliflower-lemon-caper-orzo my only modifications were to use broccoli and cauliflower and to crumble some feta on top. Charred broccoli and cauliflower is so tasty! For such a short list of ingredients it was really good. And helped me to chip away at an out of date bag of orzo I need to use.

Next dinner focus is two and a half peppers that need to be used as well as some rather old looking parsnip and carrots. Also the feta that I just opened. Am getting googling now. I’m also really struggling with meals for my three year old who seems to have become so fussy in the last few months so if anyone has any go to nutritious meals for very little ones (3yo and 10 month old) I’d be so grateful!

My instinct (but this is personal preference, I accept) is that unless you urgently need to use the creme fraiche, a seafood pasta is better without the cream element - you will have a cleaner, fresher, sauce with enough room for the delicate seafood flavours to properly shine. It also leaves you the creme fraiche to use for something else.

I would just use olive oil, garlic, chilli flakes and lemon zest/juice. A little bit of the pasta water to create a sauce. Parsley and plenty of salt and pepper at the end.

Something like this:

www.gousto.co.uk/cookbook/fish-recipes/simple-king-prawn-garlic-chilli-linguine

If your crab meat is cooked it’s only a matter of warming it through so you can just add it to the sauce for the last couple of minutes.

@WellTidy this time with the link! Doh! www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/chilli-crab-cherry-tomato-linguine

Sorry, above is to @WellTidy.

Oh yes, forgot about the cherry tomatoes. I would slice those very thinly and just add when you combine the pasta with the sauce.

Anyone else craving crab linguine now? 😊

This is a great thread. Today I made carrot soup ( I may or may not have chucked in a couple of sprouty potatoes and a squishy yellow pepper) and dinner was shakshuka to use up the red and green squishy peppers, served with flatbreads (which needed a bit more flavour but used up some yoghurt).

Well this is fantastic! Thank you! I do urgently need to use the creme fraiche, as it was best before 28th March. It hasn’t been opened so I think it will be ok.

We had cous cous tonight as well. I made a tagine with the sad looking root veg in the fridge ready for the new veg box later in the week. Roast swede, carrot, parsnip and sweet potato worked really well in this Bosh recipe. I didn’t have ras el hanout so I made some. Feeling like a proper chef tonight. One portion left for lunch tomorrow.

www.you.co.uk/bosh-roast-sweet-potato-tagine/

Very impressed with everyone’s dinners tonight.

@Furble you wouldn’t believe how badly I’m craving seafood, fish and chicken right now.

We usually balance our meals pretty carefully weekly between meat, fish and seafood, vegetarian and also rich/light/western/Asian/etc, but last three weeks or so we have been carefully eating through what’s been available rather than being precious or choosy. I’m sooo looking forward to the linguine puttanesca I’ve got planned for the end of the week.

@WellTidy it should be fine unopened for at least a week after date, plus another week or so after you’ve opened it. Just check it before each time you use it.

Freezer mystery meal tonight. Turned out to be braised short rib of beef.

I cooked extra rice last night so we could have veg fried rice tonight to use up odds and ends. DS2 and I had tofu and DH and DS1 had chicken.

If I have anything left over, I freeze it. Take it to work as lunch?

Or When I see I've got a few bits in the fridge that need using up: say a couple of sausage rolls and a scotch egg, I then dig around in the freezer and take lots of bits, bags of leftover cottage pie for example, a few stray satay chicken sticks, as a kind of cleaning exercise of the freezer, , and if I still haven't got
Enough to make a meal, I'll cook some freezer chips, or a garlic bread.

And then I sell it to the boys. "I've Got lots of bits that need using up so we're going to have 'bits and bobs' "

"Yeah", they yell."i love bits and bobs. "

I've trained them well!

I’ve not cooked today. Partly as I’m knackered (combination of cooking yesterday and doing some other tasks today, with my health my energy is quite ltd) but also partly as today’s menu was quiche (dated today - this is me being brave! I’d normally have made sure it was eaten yesterday.) and the last of the carrots that are ready peeled and sliced and I used most of in casserole yesterday. Dessert is grapes the remainder of the punnet (dated yesterday but still firm at the moment) I’ve portioned into bags and frozen as I don’t fancy them every day and I like them frozen.

The casserole seems to have frozen ok. I’ve labelled it in small writing with ball point pen so I can hopefully reuse lid several times (cleaning in between somehow)

I’ve got a big household task to do tomorrow which will knacker me for a couple days but I have pasties and quiche which will need eaten (because I wasn’t cooking much till now I’ve mostly been buying stuff that’s ready to eat but it’s getting increasingly difficult to get slots and to get certain items)

Aren’t tray bakes a bit on the dry side? I’d miss a sauce of some kind I think.

I made (sweet) bread pudding earlier and it was yum! Will definitely remember the savoury one for next time though, thank you @Weedsnseeds1 - and thank you for your suggestion of chocolate chips and marmalade - we're nearly out of marmalade but I'll give it a go once we're stocked up!!

We're out of freezer space here so I can't do any batch cooking for a while, seems a bit pointless as I can't smell/ taste anything at the moment (a cold rather than CV, I think!) but I'll be cooking more later in the week. Thankfully DP remembered my suggestion of buying things with a longer shelf life when he went shopping, so there's not much I need use up urgently.

Graphista I stick a couple of inches of cello tape on a box for the freezer, write on it with a sharpie ( felt pen). Its freezer proof but removable so you dont end up with multiple suggestions of what might be in the box when yr rummaging. Keep well and keep posting. We've got you. Xx