Don’t you just hate rummaging through the refrigerator and coming across leftovers that you have completely forgotten about? Has something like this every happened to you? You are looking for something to eat and you stumble across an old Tupperware filled with some almost-unidentifiable dish. Upon further examination, you discover that it must be lasagna, although you can’t even remember the last time it was that you made lasagna. How do some of our leftovers go unnoticed for that long? And how much money is thrown away every time you clean out your fridge of old food?
We obviously have good intentions when we place leftovers in the fridge. We hope to reuse the item in one way or another or else we would have just thrown it away. But sometimes these things go unnoticed for too long and they are no good to us anymore.
One method for making better use of your food is to designate one or two shelves in the refrigerator as the leftovers shelf. This is something we did in our home recently to make better use of the food in our fridge.
The purpose of the leftovers shelf is simply to keep leftover food in a more obvious location. Now that we have a leftovers shelf in our fridge, I can easily see what foods need to be used up. When I go to make something for lunch, I look to the leftovers shelf. And when I am looking for a side for dinner, I look to the leftovers shelf.
I have also found it beneficial to look through the items that are on the leftovers shelf periodically to find ways to use them. Sometimes I have been able to create a whole new meal out of leftovers. There many ways to reuse foods for other meals.
Our leftovers shelf at home has really helped our family to not be as wasteful. Try a leftovers shelf in your own fridge and stop throwing out so much of your hard-earned money!
Check out these articles about reusing leftovers:
Cheap Eats–What to do with Leftovers