What to do With Leftovers

Are You Stuck on What to do With Leftovers?

In our home I cook all of our meals for the week on Saturday and Sunday. This kind of meal prep can leave you asking, “What to do with leftovers?”

By meal prepping on the weekends, it prevents me from rushing home to get a nutritious meal cooked and on the table. With three boys we are swimming in extracurricular activities, church on Wednesday evenings, homework and intentional family time. I do not want to rely on convenience or prepackaged food.

I usually cook about three meals that lasts us until about Thursday. At the end of the week, we usually have the “scraps” of meals that were not finished. We do not believe in wasting food, although we do have animals that will eat it but why not recreate leftovers into a new meal.

Recreating Leftover Meat

We love tacos at the Hagan Homestead. I usually cook taco meat every week. This is an easy meal that pleases all my boys. Some weeks they eat it up and other weeks I have leftovers in the fridge that I do not want to go to waste. This is where I get creative and reinvent that meat!

You can use it as meat as filling for enchiladas, taco hot pockets, taco or enchilada pasta, or nachos. My boys are on a “hot pocket” kick, so this is what I am going to do this week.

We raise pastured chicken on our homestead and eat it probably once a week. Sometimes I will cook a whole chicken and other times I will make a one pot dish like chicken and rice. It doesn’t matter how the chicken is prepared; you can always recreate it.

There are several ways to recreate leftover chicken such as chicken salad, chicken tacos, chicken quesadillas, chicken wraps, or for a chicken topped salad.

You can also top baked potatoes with your leftover meat. Who doesn’t love a baked potato bar?

Pressure canning or freezing your meat is also an option. I have pressure canned left over rib meat, chicken, ground beef, etc. This makes for a “convenience food” later on. If we have leftover burger patties, I freeze those. I can just pop one out of the freezer when someone wants a random burger.

Although we are not huge fans of casseroles, this could also be a wonderful option. Baked potato bars are another cool way to use that leftover meat and create a fun dinner idea!

What to do With Leftover Stews, Soups, and the Like

We love stews, soups and gumbo. It is also hard to make a small batch of these things. When it gets to the end of the week and I see we will not finish what is left, I freeze it. This is if it freezes well. For freezing these types of dishes, I heavily rely on souper cubes.

Souper cubes are an awesome addition to any kitchen. They are freezer safe silicone stackable food trays. They come in many different sizes and are great for freezing individual portions. I personally like the two cup portions (navy souper cube on the left).

Using Leftover Rice

Oh rice, how I miss you! This is something I have found that my body does not tolerate well. However, two of my boys love anything with rice. We normally run out before having leftovers of this foundational food.

If you do find yourself with extra rice, you have a couple options.

Use it for fried rice to create a “new meal”. This is also where you can reuse leftover meat too!
Add to burritos or make a Mexican inspired rice
Rice freezes well. My granny is known for freezing her rice. This way you can pull it out at a later date.
Add to a chicken soup for a more filling option

Leftover Bread: Using it Before it Spoils

We make pretty much all of our bread products. If you make your own bread for your family, you know how quickly this can spoil or get stale. So, what do you do before this happens?

You can freeze it if you know your family will not eat it before it goes bad
Breadcrumbs: cut your bread into small pieces and put in the oven to bake. Then grind up and store in a mason jar for later use
Bread pudding

For the love of Sourdough! Daily loaf start to finish.

Leftovers That Do Not Freeze Well

There are certain leftovers that we just feed to the pig. This in turn also lowers our feed cost and doesn’t waste food. Examples would be noodles and beans for instance. Noodles are relatively cheap and do not freeze well. The texture of thawed beans is not our favorite, as they tend to get mushy. Pancetta, our pig, does not discriminate against these foods and gobbles them up.