I grew up in a frugal household led by my loving grandmother. Grams cooked three meals a day for me, my brothers, and my uncles every single day of her life (with just a couple of exceptions). And while we rarely left the dinner table without cleaning our plates, if food ever was left over, none of it would go to waste. My grandmother was smart and frugal and she used every bit of food, no matter how old, to repeat meals until nothing was left. She did so because she had to: she was raising three grandchildren after raising her own four kids, two of whom still came to dinner every night, all on just a small amount of child support.
The thing is, before I was old enough to help her, when we would sit down to eat leftovers, we never actually knew what we were eating. Leftovers tend to collapse into mystery mush, and since my grandma was so frugal, she'd try to repurpose odds and ends from the fridge and merge them, Frankenstein-style into whatever dish we were eating. She never threw anything out, no matter how sick it made you. Mold? Not an issue. Into the pot it went. Eventually, my brothers and I started going down to the kitchen in the middle of the night to throw out or compost expired food.
I will never know the struggles my grandmother dealt with to put food on the table when we were little. I cherish the memories I spent learning how to cook with her as I got older, while also learning a lot about being scrappy and resourceful. My favorite thing to do was help her with her garden; she taught me how to create abundance with just a few seeds and some compost soil. I am forever grateful to her for raising us, feeding us, and teaching us how to be responsible with waste.
But yet, I still cringe when I hear the word “leftovers.” Let's face it: it's a rare food that heats up better the next day. (Except for chili.) Many soups aren’t good the next day because any grains or pasta absorb the liquid and turn it to mush. Chicken never tastes good when you try to heat it up again. It gets dry, or you need to douse it in salt or hot sauce to make it palatable. (The one exception is leftover roast chicken, which isn't bad as long as you eat it cold.)
And before you tell me that I'm not reheating my leftovers right, don't bother. Go ahead, just try to reheat that spaghetti. The pasta will have sucked up the sauce it was tossed in, so you'll have to add liquid before you heat it up. And that liquid will help the pasta heat up, but it'll also dilute the flavor and make the pasta mushy. Adding a ton of butter sometimes works, but then you've got yourself some seriously butter-drenched pasta. And no matter what you do to that poor reheated spaghetti, you definitely can’t twirl it on your fork again.
To avoid leftovers, I have strategies for cutting down the yield on recipes: if I’m just cooking for myself, I buy chicken tenders from the meat department instead of chicken legs or breasts, or I break a chicken down and freeze all but one piece, saving the scraps for stock. I cut recipes in half, and save the components I didn't use for another recipe. Say a recipe calls for a can of beans—instead of making the full recipe, I'll make half of it and save the unused canned beans for another dinner the following week. Or I'll make a salad, but will refrigerate half of it without the dressing so it doesn't get soggy. Leftovers don't have to be terrible if you save the leftover components of a meal rather than remnants of the finished dish.
But even though I try to avoid leftovers at all costs, sometimes I still end up with extra food, and I feel really guilty about throwing it out. Luckily, now I have a boyfriend who will literally eat any kind of leftovers, no matter how wretched they are. I once had to fight him because he was eating chicken out of the trash after I had just thrown it away (it was over a week old). I've also argued with roommates who would put tin foil on their partially opened beer bottles so they could "save them" for the next day. Sure, you can cook with leftover wine (which is not a problem I usually have), but leftover beer just belongs in the drain. And the more people in my life who try to assert their love of leftovers, the more I stand by my conviction: Leftovers are gross.
