Leftovers

Almost everyone who cooks for a family has issues with leftovers.  Leftovers of popular dishes (in our house this would be my oven-baked fried chicken) disappear like tax breaks over the fiscal cliff.  Other, less popular dishes, like the tomato soup I made a few days ago, would sit around until kingdom come before anyone touched them again if I didn't do something with them.

But since I hate to waste food, I've had to get creative recently with what I do with my leftovers.  With the aforementioned tomato soup, I added some tomato paste and a bunch of spices and made a pretty decent spaghetti sauce, which was devoured by everyone.  That's a good thing, because it means that not a scrap went to waste.

I've also gotten in the habit of using ripe bananas in my buckwheat pancakes.  Buckwheat is slightly bitter and the sweetness of the bananas really makes these pancakes wonderful.  I've put leftover sauces on baked potatoes, used leftover bread to make chocolate bread pudding, and of course boiled down whole leftover chicken carcasses for broth and for dog food.  

But I wish I had one of my grandmothers around, because I have a feeling there are a lot more tricks for using up leftovers out there than what I'm currently doing.  And every time I have to throw out some leftover fajita or burrito filling, a bag of old vegetables or  piece of fruit, or a quarter-cup of cranberry sauce leftover from Thanksgiving (because it got stuck in the back of the fridge and I forgot it was there), I wish I had a few more tricks up my sleeve to put these scraps to a useful purpose, other than giving them to our chickens or throwing them out.