To think everyone uses leftovers

[moogy1a]

Certain smug, lispy, fat tongued chefs make a living at the moment by telling people not to throw perfectly good food away if you've cooked too much.
Surely no one does anyway?
Would anyone really cook say a roast chicken, not eat it all, so bin it rather than keep for sarnies / stir fry/ nibbling at secretly in the kitchen?
Do you bin leftover food or use it later?

Leftovers from a plate go in the food recycling bin. Leftovers from the pan / pot get reused whenever possible. DH dislikes the same food twice in a row, so it either waits a day or two or gets used as something else.

I can't abide waste!

If I do a roast joint or chicken I freeze leftovers in gravy for a midweek roast. Maybe my standards are low but I cant tell the difference from the just cooked and freezer roast.

You don't like wasting food, don't waste it. Don't tell others what they should do.

And any sentence that includes the word 'everyone' is automatically wrong.

Gosh tee you're in a good mood this morning. I recommend some leftover curry. Always cheers me up when I'm feeling nowty

I've been awake since 0330 because my brain and body hate me and I hate 'everyone' statements. They are so very idiotic.

I am just amazed that people can afford to throw it away. I am horrified by my food bills and I use all left overs. Chicken is deliberately bought for at least 2 meals and then I boil the carcass for stock and make soup.

"You don't like wasting food, don't waste it. Don't tell others what they should do.
And any sentence that includes the word 'everyone' is automatically wrong."
no it isn't. I can think of loads of sentences containing the word everyone which are incontrovertibly right. Including "In a world of diminishing resources everyone should do everything they can to conserve what we have" And this includes not throwing away food.

Okay.

I'm going downstairs to throw something away Tee.

I don't do the cooking, but DH often makes a huge chilli/curry/shepherd's pie/soup that lasts into the second day and a third day's lunches.

We none of us turn up our noses at leftovers. Any raw/veg left over goes into the wormery. Any dodgy meat goes into the magpies.

QOD

I am the queen of using up leftovers and some of the 'leftover' meals are better than the originals.

Leftover chilli > burritos or enchiladas
Leftover roast meat or stew > pie
Old bits of crusty bread and slightly past their best tomatoes > Crostini/ Pa Amb Oli just like you pay a fortune for in Mallorca.

I always cook with leftovers in mind, because it just lengthens the time to when you have to cook again .

I sometimes get a bit weary about the big Christmas day cook fest, but get it right, and you don't need to cook again for several days (helps if you really like roast dinners and the whole cold meat/salad/cheese/bread/pickles idea, but one of the most delicious things I remember from last year was fried up 3 day old roast potatoes and pigs in blankets).

However, lots of people do throw food away, either because they 'don't want to eat the same food again', don't know how, CBA or don't have suitable storage facilities. Official food safety guidelines are also massively over-cautious IMHO.

I always try to use up food before it goes off, or freeze it, including things like making slightly wilty veg into soup, or freezing stale bread for breadcrumbs etc. And yet, you can buy breadcrumbs, which to me is madness.

I remember being at a friend's house once, where we had a meal where there was a few prawns and a bit of fried steak leftover (we had wraps and there was enough left for a couple more) and her DH just picked the bowl up and threw the lot in the bin .

Even worse, he was out of work at the time, and my friend only worked part time, so they were really struggling. And yet they didn't see the value in saving what would have been another meal for one person, and probably their DD as well, if it was bulked out with some veg/cheese/rice.

The stats on food waste are shocking. In our house, we throw away almost nothing (in value it will be somewhere between £1 per month and £1 per week), whereas it is alleged that the average household throws away £700 per year worth of food. At the same time almost everyone is complaining about how expensive food is and how short of money they are, but they can't see the value in getting the best out of the food they buy?

I try to use them up, but sometimes it just doesn't work out, midweek plans change at short notice and sometimes I find a box of leftovers the back of the fridge a week later that has to go out. Having a bigger freezer would really help, but we haven't got the space for one.

BTW, most food waste would be alleviated if people used common sense rather than the nanny state's instance on giving everything a date and people being told they have to follow those dates.

I am hoping as the older generation dies out, some of this will end as most people I know don't seem to be quite so wedded to those dates. Although some certainly are, including my husband, to the point that I unpackage things once opened so he doesn't know what the date is/was.

Well haven't I just found the 'look how much money we have to burn/chuck away thread? I'm appalled at those that waste.

my chap, who I don't live with, has a habit of impulse buying loads of nice food, and then never getting around to eating it. it simply goes out of date and then gets thrown out.
I look forward to going around and having a good root around his fridge - the old stuff gets liberated and taken to mine, to feed my dcs. saves me a fortune

ds you should eat this food, that you are allergic too
sigh, not really the discussion but hey ho,
it's like me satin to ds who needs life long medication, ds don't spit that out, as the world is dimishling of medical supplies and it's just so wasteful
and this is even more madly off topic!!!

"I agree TEE, their is no such thing as everyone should do this, because circumstances in every household matters, ds you should eat this food, that you are allergic too, and ds1 you should eat this food that you absolutely abhor, because some pleb on the net says we should never waste food"

Because you would have left overs of food your children are allergic to or absolutely abhor exactly why?

Why would you have leftovers of a food you're allergic to?
If you've got the food for someone who is not allergic then let them have the leftovers surely?

People throw food away because they know they can always get more.
If you are on a tight budget, you don't throw food away, you don't forget that you have food in the fridge to be eaten and you become more inventive about how much you cook and what you do with any leftovers.
But if you've never had to worry about funding the next day's food, it can be hard to understand the problem. Laziness and tidiness take over and food is binned.

Throw left overs away? Good god no. I have a pathological hatred of waste and a life-long love of second hand stuff; I love left overs. I bought fish and chips last Saturday, couldn't eat them all, so had the LOs for brunch the next day. Bliss! But I rarely have LOs anyway as I've sussed out portion size (so rarely don't have a clean plate at home) and tend to cook in bulk then freeze in potions, so pretty much every meal is a LO of sorts. If I leave food when eating out I tend to ask for a doggy bag too because I get a buzz from enjoying the meal twice.

I used to spend a lot if time at a family members farm. He, in turn, had been snowed in for 6 weeks in the 1950's. They had gone hungry. Consequently he never threw anything away and became something of a hoarder.

The fridge was full of food. All of it old.he had freezers in the barn packed full of un identifiable lumps of "leftovers". Every meal was something old, maybe yesterday's, maybe last weeks, maybe a few years old. It always tasted stale and often smelled worse. He would cut mould off meat and reheat.

Once he served a beautiful chocolate cake, one bite and I knew there was something very wrong. There was mould covering the cake, under the chocolate frosting. It was disgusting and had been frozen after it had gone mouldy. This has put me off leftovers all my life. Yes I will reheat lasagne/curry etc the next day but beyond that it goes in the dog, or the bin.