Baby Arugula looked really good this week at the grocery store. I can make salad with the leftover chicken, I thought. When I actually went to make the salad, I realized I shouldn't have turned up my nose at all the tomatoes. What was I going to put on this salad besides chicken? I chopped up an apple. I sliced up a red onion. I found some sliced almonds that had been overpowered by the hazelnuts they were sitting next to. And voila. Dinner.
There was leftover pork roast in the fridge and lots of pasta in the cabinet. That didn't sound particularly good together until I decided to toss them with the leftover broccoli-slaw.
There's some sort of leftover meat on these tostadas, but I loaded them up with so much lettuce I can't tell what's under there anymore.
There was pork, there was chicken, there was not a lot of time. I decided to mix up some BBQ sauce and hope it tasted like a meal.
We still had leftover pork in the fridge and I knew no one would be excited to eat it for lunch if I said, "Just microwave it," so I made a big production of lunch. Biscuits from scratch with homemade barbecue sauce and frozen vegetables. Who eats vegetables at home for lunch? Not us...
This is leftover sauce with leftover asparagus (not that I made all the asparagus one night—this is just what was left of the bunch). This is also my paper napkin as a diffuser for the point-and-shoot's flash. I'm not sure which is more delightfully lazy: homemade sauce from the microwave or picking up my napkin instead of moving the plate to a better location.
I made a combination of the previous barbecue sauces I'd made before—white vinegar, ketchup, brown sugar, cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce—and marinated half the leftover pork. Then I made yellow rice with green beans and served it on tostada shells. Easy enough for a Monday.
We've been avoiding converting any of the leftover chicken, turkey, or steak into dinner. Last night we walked all the way to Wendy's rather than eat leftovers. But tonight I went for it. There was a box of ziti. There were jars of pasta sauce. I had just bought a bag of frozen chopped kale. We could do this. We could make something of this... What I came up with was a super-cheesy leftover poultry baked ziti dish. Kind of light on the sauce, but still good.
LV said he wanted me to make dinner for Valentine's Day. He would make breakfast. When we looked through the refrigerator, our options for dinner were ground beef, leftover turkey, leftover chicken, or leftover steak. He suggested using the ground beef and leftover tostadas for Mexican pizzas. With some taco seasoning and fresh tomatoes, it didn't feel like we were eating Friday's dinner all over again. Ooh, I forgot to serve the leftover yellow rice. Oh well. We had leftover cupcakes instead.
I saw this picture in the hopper and thought, Didn't I already post the turkey? Oh, that's right. I used up more of the leftover cranberry BBQ sauce on leftover pernil and fresh egg noodles. ("Fresh" in the sense that I just boiled them. Not that I just rolled them out by hand. I haven't begun making pasta yet. There are too many things to try long before that.) Between the pernil and the BBQ sauce, there was a whole lot of flavor going on in this dish.
I wanted to make meatballs. Big Italian meatballs. But that plan just wasn't working out. First, I didn't have bread. Second, I didn't have time. After three days of wanting spaghetti and meatballs, I decided to simply make spaghetti and dump the sauce over the leftover roast chicken. Good enough.
This time, rather than make more breakfast-for-dinner fare, I felt like making macaroni & cheese to go with the leftover ham. I had actually had leftover macaroni & cheese for lunch. This is the container that it had been in. Rather than get another plate dirty, I ate my dinner in the leftover dish. Leftovers galore...
I took the steak out of the freezer several days ago with bigger plans than simply making plain penne and frozen green beans. But here we are, plain penne and frozen green beans with some really good leftover steak. Mmm...
I made a dozen biscuits, thinking I'd eat those during the week. But then dinnertime rolled around and I realized that I could use them for dinner again tonight. I don't know why (I don't think I've seen any TV chefs pushing the idea lately), but I was inspired to take the leftover pork roast and mix it with a chopped onion, some bottled BBQ sauce, some homemade BBQ sauce (ketchup, vinegar, brown sugar, dry mustard), and serve it hot over frozen vegetables. Yeah, frozen vegetables are my friend. Scrappy really liked it.
Meanwhile, I've decided the baby is ready to start learning to eat from a spoon. (The self-timer on this camera goes nuts flashing a red light on the subject, hence eye contact from baby.) I bought the rice cereal, but for now he's starting with milk on a spoon. It's not like he takes more than a few tastes.
When the opportunity arises, LV likes to order a dish from Italian restaurants that has ham and a cream sauce. He asked me to hold the peas. Luckily, there were no peas in this frozen vegetable mix. He also requested a really thick sauce. I added corn starch, thinking that would do the trick. Instead we ended up with a lumpy alfredo sauce. Oh well. He still enjoyed it.
In my head, the leftover chicken (that gigantic cutlet) was set to become chicken pot pie. I just wasn't sure how I was going to make the crust with so little butter and shortening left. There were still more cookies to make... Besides that, I never find the Better Homes & Gardens recipe to be all that filling. With all kinds of time on my hands to ponder life's mysteries (I can't say feeding and playing with a newborn requires as much brain power as it does hands), I had plenty of opportunity to decide how to make the most of this pot pie.
This is the new and improved chicken pot pie, which now included four potatoes and a biscuit crust.
I like when LV asks if there's anything I need him to pick up on his way home. Today I needed tortillas; I had an idea for that leftover shredded pork.
There was a box of frozen chopped spinach in the freezer (again, from early in the pregnancy when I wanted to have lots of this kind of stuff on hand) which I thought could make for a good filing. "Good" in the way that it's not beans and we didn't have any rice. Then I made a sauce. Something like "ketchup + ground cumin + something runny + something else that's tasty." And when LV got home, I wrapped up the pork in flour tortillas and toasted it in the oven. They were okay.
There's nothing quite like pairing bad-for-you-white bread with a helping of I-think-this-is-good-for-me lentils. LV would never eat this. I made it for lunch.
Trying to make the most of the leftover Manwich and slip in as many vegetables as I can, I decided to put frozen peas and lima beans on a tortilla with cheese and the leftovers. It needed a lot of hot sauce.
