Thursday, April 30, 2015

Dinner Diaries: Recycling

I really do love to cook dinner. Baking is more of a science (I will have a cookie story for you soon) but with savory dinners, oh, one can be creative and adaptive.

I would love to incorporate more vegetarian meals into my repertoire, but I have a couple meat-n-potatoes guys so...  

I've had quite a spell of using leftovers or, as I call it, recycling.

I always take advantage of what's on sale. Really cheap pork steaks made Pork Swiss Steak. Leftovers saved for the weekend taco trifecta (my fancy name for a choice of 3 taco fillings). 


The most boring dinner, but they all love chicken, rice and broccoli. Chicken left over for the taco trifecta and also chicken tortilla soup. Three meals from one 99¢ /lb. chicken!


London broil. Pasta recycled from the pork dinner, and the leftover steak pays it forward to the tacos.


No photos, but after the tacos there was still pork and London broil left! So they recycled themselves into a not-shepherd's pie. What would you call that, a cow/swine-herd's pie? I was a bit skeptical about mixing pork and beef together but I was encouraged to do so, and the results were tasty. 

Lamb Chop. Green beans don't need no stinkin' casserole, just the onions! (Potatoes later recycled into breakfast burritos.)


Recycled those green beans into a niçoise style potato salad. Spinach and strawberry salad made up on the spot, along with pan fried salmon. 

The leftover salmon will turn into Ina Garten's salmon cakes

So, what have you done with your leftovers recently?

3 comments:

Gary's third pottery blog said...

Haha, too funny, I was just making some rice to change up leftovers being served later :)

Common Household Mom said...

When we got married, my husband told me that leftovers were his favorite meal. I believed him. It might have been true way back when but it is no longer true.

You are very inventive with your leftovers and I applaud you! Our leftovers are usually my lunch the next day (I work at home). Leftovers are usually MY favorite meal because leftovers mean less cooking.

Karen (formerly kcinnova) said...

Leftovers, if we have any, either show up the next day for lunch or (more likely) end up blended into a soup.
Now that the 22yo has moved back home, leftovers rarely stick around long enough to be "planovers" -- those meals you make plans for with the dinner leftovers.