Must-gos: Using up Leftovers So Your Family Will Eat Them

I figured I'd better put the completed leftover meal at the top of this blog or no one would finish reading it! Because you look in the refrigerator and see.......

Some yucky looking old spaghetti sauce and some yucky looking old leftover soup and you think your family would never touch it!  So, how can you use this up?

First, a fresh bowl does wonders for old food. I decided after I put this soup in this bowl to dump it into a pot first and add water and boil. I always boil leftover food pretty hard for a little while. This soup is a couple days old. For a chart of recommendations from the FDA for food safety, please see and follow this link:

http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/FoodborneIllnessContaminants/UCM109315.pdf

After boiling and putting the soup back into the bowl, I added some cheese garnish. Voila! Lovely again!

Next, I added water to the spaghetti sauce. I made this spaghetti sauce from my garden tomatoes. If you've ever produced your own food, you have so much respect for it that you do not like to waste ANY of it! Next, I boiled it for a while and boiled some fresh noodles to go with it.

 After boiling and adding the fresh noodles, I sprinkled the top with parsley to give it a nice fresh look!

I served it with some asparagus I bought on sale (and froze) and some rolls I got for half price. 

Last but not least! Creme Cake for half price for dessert! 

Using leftovers makes this meal very low cost and although it began looking like something everyone would reject, it was turned into a very palatable and good meal. There is an old song that goes "Making love out of nothing at all". As I fix leftovers, I often sing to myself "Making lunch, out of nothing at all!"

In my opinion, the key is to not wait until you are in financial trouble to live this way but the key is to live this way to keep yourself out of financial trouble. Some people just will not eat leftovers. I see that as wasteful. There are so many people that are hungry in this world and it costs so much to produce food, not just in money but in irreplaceable energies and fossil fuels. It makes so much sense to me in so many ways to use up leftovers. We call them Must-gos at our house. My family is so used to it that no one ever thinks twice about it!

Happy Savings!