Jazzing Up Leftovers

By Christine Steendahl

Most refrigerators are packed with leftover foods. While a lot of us hate to let food go to waste, the only alternative is to reuse food we didn’t finish a few days ago and prepare dinner out of leftovers.

While leftovers were once a tasty meal, sadly, to many family members they are no longer appealing. Fear not, with just a few tricks, you can create tasty meals once again simply by utilizing leftover food. Following are some hints.

Mix Your Leftover Meat Dishes with Fresh Pasta

One way to recreate a great meal from your leftovers is to blend it with fresh ingredients. In this example, pasta works good with many different beef and chicken dishes. Use thin spaghetti, wide noodles, wagon wheels, spirals, you name it with your meat leftovers. Add gravy, ketchup, tomato sauce or even chili to to turn an ordinary dish into an extraordinary dish.

Vegetable Dishes with Rice- Twice as Nice

If you have leftover vegetable dishes that you would like to reuse, one of the greatest ways to do so is to prepare it with rice. Whether you choose white or brown rice, you can prepare an awesome vegetable dish and make it into an entirely new meal. Usually with vegetables, you have little opportunity to reuse them as leftover before they become mushy. Try to keep them crisp and fresh.

Create Soups with Leftovers If you are stuck with a few meals in your refrigerator and you don’t know exactly what to do with them, you can always toss them into a pot and prepare delicious soup. Whether it is chicken, turkey, hamburger meat or beef, making flavorful soup out of leftovers makes sense and also is quite great.

Preparing soups using leftover is extremely painless. You can pretty much add in any sliced meat and chopped vegetable into some broth or cream to create a great tasting soup. Even old bread can be useful.

Use Leftover Fruit for Fruit Smoothies Generally, many houses will have a couple leftover apples, oranges or bananas in their refrigerator. While the odd piece of fruit is not necessarily a leftover, practically all fruit can be utilized to prepare delicious fruit smoothies. Fruit smoothies are easily prepared with some milk, yogurt, fruit and a blender. Not only are they healthy, but perfect for a treat or even breakfast. Fruit smoothies are ideal for leftover fruit or even slightly over ripen fruit. Mixed with many other ingredients, they still taste good and won’t go unused.

The next time you search deep into your refrigerator and see all the meals from the past week, don’t panic, use them to prepare new meals, soups and even savory desserts.

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