Don’t Forget Those Leftover Meals

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Most refrigerators are filled with leftovers. While most of us hate to let food go to waste, the only option is to reuse food we couldn’t finish a few days ago and create dinner out of leftovers. While leftovers were once a delicious meal, sadly, to many family members they are no longer appealing. Fear not, with just a few suggestions, you can create tasty meals once again merely by using leftovers. Following are some tips.

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 great with lots of different beef and chicken dishes. Use thin spaghetti, wide noodles, wagon wheels, spirals, the sky’s the limit with your meat leftovers. Add gravy, ketchup, tomato sauce or even chili to make an old dish literally brand new.

Vegetable Dishes with Rice- Twice as Nice
If you have leftover vegetable dishes that you would like to reuse, one of the best ways to do so is to blend it with rice. Whether you choose white or brown rice, you can prepare a great vegetable option and make it into an entirely new meal. Usually with vegetables, you have little opportunity to use them as leftover before they become limp. 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 make delicious soup. Whether it is chicken, turkey, hamburger meat or beef, making savory soup out of leftovers is sensible and also is quite great.

Cooking soups using leftover is extremely painless. You can generally throw in any sliced meat and chopped vegetable into some broth or cream to make an awesome tasting soup. Even old bread comes in handy.

Use Leftover Fruit for Fruit Smoothies
Occasionally, most homes will find a couple leftover apples, oranges or bananas in their refrigerator. While the odd piece of fruit is not generally a leftover, practically all fruit can be used to make yummy fruit smoothies. Fruit smoothies are quickly made with some milk, yogurt, fruit and a blender. Not only are they high in nutritional value, but perfect for a snack or even breakfast. Fruit smoothies are perfect for leftover fruit or even slightly over ripen fruit. Mixed with many other ingredients, they still taste good and won’t go wasted.

The next time you look deep into your refrigerator and see all the meals from the past week, don’t fret, utilize them to create new meals, soups and even flavorful desserts.

Article by:
Christine Steendahl is the owner of Dine Without Whine where you can find delicious family friendly dinner recipes.