Cook to make leftovers

Save time and money with strategic meal planning

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is to cook to make leftovers. There are very
few scenarios in life where it is possible to save

(00:23):
both time and money, but by making a little extra
and cooking things that keep well, it is possible to
do both and perhaps even eat better than you otherwise would.
Because I work from home, I am responsible for procuring
my lunch each day. Going out to buy something would

(00:45):
take a fair amount of time, ordering in would be
quite expensive. I can cook, of course, but I am
usually trying to cram in as much as possible before
my kids get home from school. This is why I
love eating leftovers. I can just heat something up quickly

(01:06):
and I will eat something tastier than if I were
eating a bowl of cereal or a peanut butter sandwich.
It is also sometimes nice for dinners to cook once
and then get to eat a second dinner with minimal effort.
So in my house, Wednesdays in particular tend to be
a night where we cook to generate a lot of leftovers. Ideally,
this is something hearty like chili that can then be

(01:28):
reheated multiple times. My lunch is for Thursday, Friday, and
sometimes Saturday are then set. I also love when we
manage to do something like grill a bunch of steaks
on Saturday. This then can turn into dinner on Sunday
with some repurposing. Cook once and eat twice or more

(01:51):
is a great philosophy for life. This seems straightforward enough,
and indeed, cook enough for leftovers is pretty common advice. However,
I know many people have trouble making this work in
real life. That's because cooking for leftovers does require an
added level of meal and schedule planning that isn't always straightforward.

(02:16):
Schedules can be chaotic or shift from week to week.
Not all foods keep well or seem appetizing after a
day or two, and judging quantities can be an uncertain business.
If you make a lot of leftovers and wind up
throwing them away, then you have wasted both time and money.

(02:39):
But fortunately this planning isn't too hard. You just need
to take a realistic look at your schedule and choose
what you cook carefully to make sure the leftovers are
palatable and can be enjoyed in various ways. First, there
is schedule awareness, and not just at the day to

(02:59):
day level. I generally look at my week and figure
out which nights are going to involve lots of people
eating and which are not. If my husband and I
were going out for a Sunday night dinner, for instance,
then it might not be worthwhile to cook extra on
Saturday because the kids would be happy on Sunday with
mac and cheese. If I am traveling, no one will

(03:23):
be eating the leftovers designated for lunch. As my husband
works in an office and my kids are at school.
In your family too, it might be helpful to identify
for which meals eating leftovers would be a good option,
And when this just doesn't make sense, you can then
choose which nights you will cook and how much based

(03:44):
on there being a spot for leftovers afterwards. As then
you see that Monday and Tuesday are both nights when
people are home, so you plan to cook enough on
Monday to mostly cover Tuesday. Or you see that you
are working from home on certain days like Wednesday and Thursday,
and you see that you will be home on Tuesday night,
and so you will cook enough on Tuesday to cover

(04:05):
your lunches the next two days. As for what you cook,
this requires some strategy, but I think there are generally
two approaches here. One is to cook something that you
can eat mostly as is a second or third time.
This works for things like chili or a slow cook
or chicken dish that you eat with rice or something

(04:27):
like that. These foods don't go immediately mushy as leftovers.
If desired, you can eat something different for a side
dish the second time if you particularly value variety. The
other approach is to cook a lot of a base
ingredient and then incorporate that into meals in different forms
over the next few days. If you're going to try

(04:49):
to get two dinners out of leftovers, this might be
the best approach, as your crowd won't complain about getting
the same dinner twice if it isn't actually the same dinner.
So the other night we grilled steaks on Saturday, which
we ate with veggies and baked potatoes. Then Sunday night
was steak Fijeda night, wrapped in tortillas with some veggies

(05:12):
and guacamole and salsa. The steak got it celebrated Encore.
This would work with any sort of protein chicken pork,
what have you. All of these could get a second
life as fajitas, or with sauce and pasta, or mixed
with eggs and veggies, or stir fried with veggies and
topped with some sort of exciting sauce. There is a

(05:32):
little prep work, but not a ton of prep work.
Dinner is often ready in fifteen minutes in these cases.
And finally, to make all this happen, you need to
cook more than you need for one meal and enough
to cover the additional meals the leftovers are designated for.
This does involve some guessing if you don't have a

(05:54):
career and say food service, but like anything, you can
experiment here multiple teenagers in my house, so food cooking
feels like an industrial process over here, and the answer
is always cook more. But if you have fewer or
smaller people, you can just try cooking what feels like
enough for two meals and then see aim for a

(06:16):
second meal that has got some flexibility. Something like fajitas
can often be bulked up with veggies if the protein
is more scant then you assumed it would be after
dinner number one, And if you made more than you
need for dinner number two, you could just use that
as a protein in breakfast someday. When you are around

(06:37):
people often resolve to save money and eat more healthfily
in the new year. Eating leftovers can certainly help with that.
You are not spending money on eating out, and if
your dinners involved, say vegetables, eating leftovers for lunch means
your lunch will involve vegetables, which might not have been

(06:58):
the case at a fast food place. Eating leftovers saves
time too, since you don't have to cook as often
or run out to a restaurant to get a meal.
But it does involve a little planning, So maybe that
can be the resolution for the year. Figuring out that
piece can make meals better all around. In the meantime,

(07:22):
this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making
the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach
me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast

(07:51):
is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia,
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