Learning to love the leftovers

Any time you throw food into the trash can, you’re throwing money into the trash can.

Quite often, that food you’re throwing away is the remnants of a meal from a few days ago. You stuck the remnants in the refrigerator, but every time you went to grab another meal, you overlooked the leftovers. You talked yourself out of them or you just simply didn’t bother to consider them.

Simply put, every time you choose to eat leftovers, you’re basically getting a free meal. It’s a meal where you’ve already accounted for the ingredients. It’s a meal that is going to disappear in a day or two if you don’t eat it.

I often look at it this way: a meal of leftovers “pushes back” the other meals you might consume. If you eat leftovers, then the meal you would have had at that time is saved for another day. You might be able to put off grocery shopping for a day or two if you do that a few times, reducing your trips to the grocery store in a month, which directly reduces your food bill for that month.

A meal made of leftovers is money directly in your pocket.

The challenge many people have with leftovers, though, is that they can often seem really unappealing compared to other options. When you’re considering what to have for lunch or for dinner, leftovers represent eating something again that you just had in the last day or two. It often represents something a bit less fresh than making a new meal, too. Thus, it’s often easy to talk yourself out of leftovers.

Here are a few tactics I use to overcome those challenges.

First, I maximize the convenience level of leftovers. When I pack away leftovers, I usually arrange a plate for myself so that I can simply grab it, throw it straight into the microwave, and have a meal on the table in just a couple of minutes. If I lower the effort and time investment of leftovers in the moment, I’m more likely to choose them in the middle of a busy workday.

You can apply this yourself by packing leftovers to take to work with you. If your leftovers are the only convenient option for lunch at work, that’s the option you’ll take.

What about flavor? There are a lot of techniques for spicing up the flavor of leftovers. Keep some common flavor enhancers on hand in your home (or at work). Salt, ground black pepper, hot sauce, oregano, basil, and tarragon are all great things to add to leftovers to add a kick of flavor for just a penny or two.

You can get creative with leftovers as well, using them as ingredients in other dishes. Leftover baby carrots can be chopped up into a salad. Leftover ground beef or beans can quickly be turned into a burrito. Leftover tomato sauce and/or tomatoes can quickly be turned into a pasta sauce.

Your goal should be to never throw away leftover foods that you would otherwise eat. If you’ve got it in your home, you’ve paid for it in some fashion. Throwing it away is no different than throwing money away.