Green Options » leftovers

Recycling Grub: Best Leftover Recipes

Divine Caroline — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:06:21 +0000

Editor’s Note: This is a contribution from one our content partners, Divine Caroline.

By Allison Fishman of MainStreet for DivineCaroline.com

One of my favorite dinners as a kid was “leftover night,” when my parents would resurrect the greatest hits from the previous week.

Only now do I realize they were not only serving me delicious encores, they were also saving money on grocery bills.

By high school I was a leftover epicure. I knew which leftover dishes were better cold (lo mein and pizza), which improved when microwaved (stews and chili’s), and how to morph certain leftovers into a totally different dish, even better than the first.

Here are six of my favorite recyclable meals:

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Thrifty Thursday - Five Ideas for Using Up Leftover, Cooked White Rice

Robin Shreeves — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:55:25 +0000

We try not to do takeout meals often at our house except for our weekly pizza. There’s always a lot of packaging waste with takeout food and the nutrition value is usually poor. Somewhere along the line however, we started the tradition of getting Chinese takeout on the first day of school. And yesterday was it.

I’ve been paying much closer attention to the amount of food waste that my family of four produces lately. As I wrote about in The Shocking Statistics of Food Waste, about 30% of the food produced in America gets thrown away. The environmental impact of wasted food is immense.

As I cleared the table after dinner last night, I thought about the three cups or so of white rice that came with our takeout that nobody touched. Nobody ever touches it. It usually gets put in the refrigerator only to be thrown away a week later.

It’s perfectly good rice so I decided to spend a little time finding some recipes that could use it up. Here are five recipes that you can make using leftover, cooked white rice next time you faced with one or more of those uneaten containers.

Garlic Rice - This is a simple Philippine fried recipe that calls for adding pantry staples plus some ground pork, but after reading comments made on the recipe from users, the pork can be omitted and vegetables such as mushrooms and green peppers can be added.

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Veggie Bahn Mi Recipe

Meredith Melnick — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:06:10 +0000

When we had company unexpectedly this week, I had to think quickly of a dish to serve. Earlier that day, I made some of the raw beet salad that I wrote about last month. I had about two cups of leftover shredded beets + carrots. So I decided to pickle them in a combination of rice vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper and honey for the rest of the day.

As a quick snack for my pop-over friends, I made a modified Bahn Mi sandwich (you know, those incredibly complex Vietnamese sandwiches of liver pate, chicken and pork pieces, and pickled veggies between crusty slices of baguette).

To take the place of the liver pate, I used homemade hummus. The beat salad stood in for the usual daikon-and-carrot mixture. Instead of meat, I used some extra-firm, marinated tofu (a.k.a. the best tofu ever). The crusty baguette, veggies and tofu are all locally grown/made and picked up at the farmer’s market. Recipe after the jump:

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What to do with Leftovers? Scramble them!

Sharon Troy — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:53:19 +0000

I love finding new recipes and trying out new things. But one of the problems with following a recipe to the letter is that you can end up with a lot of leftover veggies, grains, etc. After my recent Mac and Cheese taste test, for example, I found myself with half a potato, half a carrot, and a big chunk of of onion leftover. I also had a whole lot of fresh spinach burning a hole in my vegetable crisper.

My favorite way to use up just about any leftover veggies is to scramble them. You could use eggs of course, but tofu scrambles are a cholesterol-free approach that even soy-substitute-skeptics can enjoy. I find that half a block of tofu makes about one serving.

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