Layering Leftovers– stretching your meals

[Melissa Burnell]

Roasting a chicken is usually a three meal event for me unless it’s really small. Roast chicken with veg, potatoes and gravy the first night, chicken pot pie the next and chicken soup from the carcass and the last bits of meat for some other time.

I do basically the same thing with most plain meat meals though. For instance, this week we had a london broil just broiled plain, the left over meat will go into enchiladas.

Other weeks it might just have been shredded and put in the freezer for a later date.

For me most casserole type meals start with leftover meats for me, except for stuff with hamburger. Sometimes it takes the leftovers from two or more meals but I feel like I stretch my budget a bit that way.

Plus for stuff we have often like spaghetti sauce or tacos I just keep a perpetual container in the freezer. Each batch starts with whatever’s in there and gets new ingredients added to it.

Whatever’s left over goes back into the freezer. That way I don’t end up with small leftovers that end up getting thrown out.

I don’t do it much now because there are rarely leftovers but I used to keep a zip bag in the freezer for leftover veg. Once it was full I would make hamburger soup.

Whatever was in the bag went into the pot with hamburg browned with onions and garlic, a can of tomatoes, and spices. If you really want to stretch it you can add a big spoon of browned hamburg to the bag everytime you make something with it and before you know it you’ve got a nice pot of soup for the cost of a can of tomatoes.

Lori.

[Author]

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