You got left overs?

You open your refrigerator and discover that you got a lot of a food containers, stashed there for weeks, and oh no forgotten! Preparing meals is such a challenging work for mom, from planning, budgeting and even the quantity or the amount of food we have to prepare especially now that prices of commodities really soared high, and so what happens when we don’t plan our meals right, yeah leftovers. More than any reasons, it should makes sense for us to be smarter about fully using the food that we buy, and instead of putting these into the garbage (which I am guilty of). And so I have gathered a few tips, ideas and easy ways to use leftover that I hope could help moms out there.

Store Leftover Foods Correctly

You can use containers, which allow you to see what’s inside and freezing bags. Label and date the contents.

Dedicate a Left-over Day

In my family, I see to it that by Friday, I do not cook new meal and we should and must finish whatever is left over from the previous meals we have.

Turn Dinner Into Lunch

Store a lunch able portion of a dinner in a container and pack it for lunch the next day. Which I always do for my husband for his work lunches.

Think Leftovers as an Ingredient

Try making a stir-fry, sandwiches, casserole, a soup and broth for your left overs.

Portion and Store

Divide and portion foods such as loaf bread in which you can portion it, and the unused slice could be wrap and freeze.

Now a days due to high price of commodities, I prefer buying a whole chicken rather than a portioned one since I can cook a lot of varieties out of it. So the other day I roasted a whole chicken and since it is already expected, I made a chicken carbonara out of the left over breast. I partnered the dish with a toasted garlic bread which was also from a frozen left over loaf bread. You can also try making macaroni chicken soup, chicken spread sandwich, chicken meat balls out of the leftovers, which are easy to make and don’t need a lot of ingredients.

And again from my thought, there no secret ingredients for any meal, it's just how you prepare it and that should always be from your heart.