Pod Insights Life Kit Plus Tired of eating leftovers? Turn your odds and ends into creative meals About this episode Do you always buy cucumbers just to watch them slowly become mush in the fridge? Or save your half-eaten pasta only to forget about it for a month? If you're done with chucking half-used ingredients in the compost bin, this episode is for you. Reporter Emily Siner shares tips on reducing food waste by repurposing leftovers, getting creative with odds and ends and shifting your perspective on the chore of cooking.
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0:00 Speaker 00 This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/podcast.
0:15 Marielle Segarra? You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.
0:20 Marielle Segarra? Hey, it's Marielle. When Margaret Lee was a kid, she watched her mom doing something that was a little unusual.
0:26 Speaker 02 She used to like to save takeout sauces from every restaurant.
0:34 Speaker 02 So she would have ketchup from one restaurant, barbecue sauce from another restaurant, maybe some kind of soy sauce or duck sauce from a Chinese restaurant.
0:42 Marielle Segarra? After she collected a bunch of them, she would mix them all together.
0:45 Speaker 02 And then she would use it to make a sauce for barbecue chicken, almost always barbecue chicken. And honestly, it was usually really good.
0:58 Marielle Segarra? Years later, when Margaret and her sister wrote a cookbook called Perfectly Good Food, they dedicated it to their mom and the way she would rescue takeout sauces. Because this was a formative lesson for Margaret. It showed her that you don't always need a recipe to make something delicious, and you can find creative ways to use up just about any ingredient in your kitchen.
1:16 Speaker 02 You have these great intentions to cook and eat the things that you're spending your money on, and especially as food costs go up, that's so frustrating. And to use it and make sure that you eat it feels very satisfying.
1:28 Marielle Segarra? The latest estimate from a nonprofit called Refed is that a quarter of all food products in the US get dumped. And the residential food sector accounts for a big part of that, which means if you spend $200 a week on groceries and takeout, you might be throwing away the equivalent of $50 of food. But also, once you get the hang of how to use more of your food, it makes the daily chore of feeding yourself easier.
1:52 Speaker 02 Food waste, in some ways, is this trendy new idea. But for many thousands of years, that was just cooking. You just used up what you had.
2:01 Marielle Segarra? On this episode of Life Kit, reporter Emily Siner is going to talk about how to make creative meals out of leftovers, out of odds and ends, and anything else you usually end up throwing away. It might shift your perspective.
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4:24 Speaker 05 It's a typical Tuesday night in my kitchen. I open the fridge before dinner and ugh, they're the remains of yesterday's takeout. A half-eaten rotisserie chicken, still on the bone, a couple of raw vegetables. And I usually end up saying something like this.
4:39 Speaker 02 Oh, there's nothing in the fridge. I don't know what to make.
4:41 Speaker 05 But cookbook author and chef Margaret Lee has a different outlook on my sad Tuesday night fridge. To her, these odds and ends from previous meals aren't the roadblock to dinner. They are dinner.
4:53 Speaker 02 Okay, well, the bone will add flavor to a broth or a stew. And all of these vegetables will work. So, you know, maybe the potatoes go in first and then the fresh leafy greens go in last. And then these vegetables are leftover from another meal. So they're already cooked, so I'll pop them in sometime in the middle.
5:12 Speaker 05 In other words, think of the end of one meal as the beginning of the next. That's takeaway one.
5:22 Speaker 06 I don't think there's almost anything in my kitchen that isn't made out of something else.
5:27 Speaker 05 Food writer and chef Tamar Adler is the author of The Everlasting Meal, which is basically a love letter to the style of cooking. The day I talked to her, she was putting together a salad for her lunch. She looked in her fridge.
5:39 Speaker 06 Found like a half-eaten burrata arugula salad.
5:43 Speaker 05 Burrata is a soft cheese and it had kind of melded into the arugula and tomatoes. I might have tossed it right then and there, but Tamar saw potential.
5:52 Speaker 06 I kind of picked the arugula off of the burrata and then added lemon juice and olive oil to it and mixed it really hard. So it became like a creamy dressing and it was so good. And I might, I might remake a burrata dressing. And it won't be as good because something about it sitting all night with the little bits and pieces made it better.
6:09 Speaker 05 These byproducts of yesterday's meal are the foundation for today's. Maybe you have some leftover rice lying around. Tamar says that is the perfect start for tonight's dinner.
6:19 Speaker 06 I will fry anything with rice into fried rice. I will, you know, saute some aromatics, so maybe some. Ginger, garlic, onion, and then whatever other leftover bit there is. So maybe there's like a little bit of beans left.
6:35 Speaker 05 And just because the meal is built from leftovers doesn't mean she treats it like a second-class dish. No, she's trying to give these ingredients new life in their new form.
6:44 Speaker 06 And sort of just take the approach of making it more flavorful and crispy and then spicy and then usually adding like a squeeze of lemon.
6:54 Speaker 05 It's all about building up your arsenal of go-to recipes that are flexible enough to use up just about anything. Margaret calls them hero recipes. For example,
7:03 Speaker 02 My house eats a lot of bread. My children love bread. I bake bread. We always have bread ends around.
7:10 Speaker 05 So one of Margaret's hero recipes is an anything-goes savory bread pudding. You throw all that leftover bread into a freezer bag and when it's full,
7:19 Speaker 02 You soak your bread in milk or cream and you add in eggs. And I like to add in all the different cheese bits that I can find from foraging my fridge. And then it can take just about any other meat or vegetable that you can think of. Generally, I just saute them with maybe onions and olive oil and make sure everything's well-seasoned. And then you pile it all into a casserole dish and you bake it for about an hour. And it is so delicious.
7:46 Speaker 05 These hero recipes do rely on some advanced planning. You need to make sure you're stocked up on staples. Aromatics like onion and garlic are essential to building flavor. Margaret always has puff pastry in her freezer, which she uses to repurpose leftovers into a savory galette. And she always has shelf-stable essentials like rice and pasta in her cupboard.
8:05 Speaker 02 Well, I've got chicken thighs and I've got canned tomatoes and I've got pasta. So all of a sudden, you have this, you know, roast chicken and tomato pasta. And then you've tossed in some fresh greens and some alliums and aromatics. And then you have this really flavorful meal that you just kind of forage from what you have.
8:25 Speaker 05 Another essential ingredient to have on hand is eggs.
8:28 Speaker 06 Like you could put anything in a frittata and it'll be great. So just like thinking of it as like, okay, well, if I don't know what to do, I will frittatas.
8:36 Speaker 05 Or, Tamara says, the even easier version of this is just to cook an egg and put it on top. It has the effect of making almost everything feel heartier and fancier. Whatever you make with the staples, you can set yourself up for success by making sure you cook enough to produce leftovers.
8:52 Speaker 06 I probably cook for like six to eight people every single time I go in the kitchen because I can't fry rice anything if there's nothing to fry rice.
9:04 Speaker 05 Tamara also recommends thinking about what you're going to do with all the leftovers before you put them away in your fridge. For example, she might chop up the ends of the parsley she used for dinner and put them on some leftover pasta and then put it in the fridge already combined. Now the next meal is halfway started. Or at the very least, she labels the leftovers with their intended use.
9:24 Speaker 06 If I had a little bit of leftover blueberries, I wouldn't say leftover blueberries. I would say like muffins to be on Tuesday with grated cheese. I would say like for pasta this week or like cheese rinds to turn into broth. I really liked doing that, assigning the destiny of the food and labeling it.
9:45 Speaker 05 This brings us to takeaway two, which is a very practical one. Labeling is your friend.
9:51 Speaker 02 I always have some painter's tape and a good Sharpie in my kitchen so you can label and date things.
9:57 Speaker 05 It's a method that chefs use in restaurants, Market says, but it's equally applicable in your home. And this becomes even more important when you store food in your freezer.
10:06 Speaker 02 What is this brown container that I shoved to the back of the freezer six months ago? Like, is it, is it soup? Is it cider? I have no idea. You always think you'll remember, but often you don't.
10:21 Speaker 05 Using the freezer is a whole art in itself. Margaret has her freezer bag for the ends of bread, as we talked about. She also has one for making chicken or vegetable stock that houses the carrot peels and the ends of onions and extra garlic cloves and chicken bones. And then there's the freezer bag for smoothies.
10:38 Speaker 02 You know, this blueberry is too squishy, Mom. I can't eat this. I just stick it into the freezer. This banana is too brown. I can't eat this. I stick it into the freezer. And then eventually, I just put it all in a blender with some yogurt and some juice. And I make a smoothie. And then the smoothie is delicious for all ages, even if it's made up of all the things that have been rejected in the past.
11:00 Speaker 05 Margaret also labels an entire section of her fridge for the "odds and ends of ingredients." She calls it the "eat me first" box.
11:08 Speaker 02 For example, you want a lemon for your cocktail. And you cut open a lemon. And then you open your fridge and you realize you already had a lemon open. And I will often find like three more lemons in the back of my fridge. And the idea is that you have-
11:23 Speaker 05 I feel like you're looking in my fridge right now.
11:26 Speaker 02 I'm staring at your fridge and finding all your secrets.
11:29 Speaker 05 She assures me this is nothing to be ashamed of. But having an eat me first box, or even an eat me first zone of your fridge, can help. It makes it easy to see the half-cut lemons and the open container of coconut milk, and the apple that's getting a little wrinkly but still isn't quite ready to retire to the smoothie bag.
11:45 Speaker 02 That's an organizational tool that I feel helps for everybody.
11:49 Speaker 05 In Tamar's fridge, her organizational tool is making sure everything is stored in her own containers. It becomes kind of a psychological trick.
11:56 Speaker 06 Last night, I served olives at this party. And I had gotten them in a, in like a plastic kind of clamshell thing from the olive lady. But I put them in a mason jar before I put them away.
12:08 Speaker 05 Tonight, she says, she'll be more likely to reach for her own jar than a plastic container that screams leftovers.
12:16 Speaker 05 Coming up, I put our chefs to the test with the ingredients that have stumped me in the past.
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13:21 Speaker 05 I decide to put Tamar Adler and Margaret Lee to the test. I mean, it's not often I get to ask professional chefs for personalized food advice. So I bring a list of ingredients that I have personally thrown out many times because they've stumped me. One thing is tomato paste. So if I have a recipe with tomato paste, I buy it, I use like the one tablespoon, and then the rest of it just sits there until it goes bad. What's like an easy thing to do with tomato paste?
13:48 Speaker 06 There are a lot.
13:49 Speaker 05 And then, to no one's surprise, Tamar starts rattling off a list of options.
13:54 Speaker 06 Every time you make a tomato sauce, use some. Any kind of a marinade, like a rub on chicken or whatever. Olive dressing or an olive tapenade, putting a little bit in there. Any minestrone would be very, very happy. Oh, a fresh pot of rice would be great. And it would all just end up like pinky and delicious.
14:12 Speaker 06 I mean, we've probably used it up.
14:14 Speaker 05 Yeah.
14:15 Speaker 06 Right? I think we used it up. Alternately, this is what I- Do more often. I just ignore it. When it says use tomato paste, I'm like, no, I'm just gonna use a tomato, because I can buy one tomato.
14:26 Speaker 05 In other words, you can use tomatoes in just about anything that calls for tomato paste, and vice versa. And this is such an important cooking technique that it's takeaway three. You can substitute similar ingredients for each other.
14:39 Speaker 06 Even without knowing a technique, going, okay, what is this like that I would know what to do with?
14:46 Speaker 05 For example, in the case of Tamara's leftover burrata salad, she looked at the cheese and thought, this is a creamy dairy product. It's a similar consistency to a thick yogurt or sour cream. I can make a dressing with sour cream, so why don't I make it with the burrata? Another example, courtesy of Margaret, is coleslaw. It's usually made with carrots and cabbage. Carrots are a root vegetable. Cabbage is a hardy, leafy green.
15:12 Speaker 02 Maybe instead you could swap it for collards and daikon radish or something. And that allows you to try something new. If you got something from a CSA box that you haven't used before, or something that's kind of hiding in the back of your crisper drawer and you didn't know what to do with it, then all of a sudden you have these opportunities to swap one thing out for another.
15:32 Speaker 05 You might end up with a dish that is totally different than what you expected, but equally delicious. One of the many ingredients that tends to hide in the back of my crisper drawer, uneaten, is lettuce, because as soon as it wilts, I find it unappetizing. And then I'm relieved when it turns brown enough to just throw away. And then I wonder why I bought it in the first place. So I bring this stumper to Margaret. Lettices that are getting a little suspect. How do I know if it's good to eat? And what do I do with it if it's wilty?
16:04 Speaker 02 We've evolved with the senses to help us make this decision. So smelling things, the smell test is actually really pretty solid.
16:13 Speaker 05 This applies to lots of food. If it smells bad, don't eat it. But otherwise, she says, I could pop the lettuce into a bowl of ice water, which plumps it back up. Alternatively, instead of trying to make it as crisp as possible for a fresh salad, I could just expand my idea of how it can be prepared.
16:29 Speaker 02 You can sort of change the texture totally. So you could make a lettuce soup. You could make stir fried lettuce.
16:35 Speaker 05 This is takeaway four. When in doubt, change the texture.
16:41 Speaker 05 This could look like cooking things that you might normally eat raw, like lettuce or cucumbers. It could look like puree-ing wrinkly veggies into a soup. Or it could look like grinding down the stems of parsley or basil. They still have that same herb-y taste, but the texture might be off-putting. So Tamar turns them into an herb oil.
17:00 Speaker 06 I'm gonna chop these herbs up or just stick them in the blender with a clove of garlic and blend them up and add olive oil. And then it's gonna be my, like, base sauce for everything.
17:10 Speaker 05 I tried this at home, and I can attest, a pesto made with the stems tastes exactly the same as a pesto made with the leaves. And it saved me from having to buy twice as many herbs as I need.
17:20 Speaker 06 And so I would never throw those things out. They're so good, you know?
17:24 Speaker 05 One way to increase the lifespan of all the parts of your veggies is to store them with the right balance of moisture. Baby spinach that you buy in a plastic bag tends to get gooey, Margaret says, because the plastic just retains too much moisture.
17:38 Speaker 02 So if you stick a paper towel or a kitchen cloth in there with the greens, then they'll stay fresher much longer. So things that you notice getting soggy, you could wrap in a dry cloth. Or things that look really dry, you could wrap in a wet cloth. And so kind of managing the right moisture and humidity for things.
17:58 Speaker 05 Not every experiment with every ingredient is going to be successful. In fact, this is takeaway five. Cooking with leftovers should be an adventure. Like Margaret's mom throwing all the sauces together on a chicken, not trying to achieve the exact same outcome each time. Or Tamar frying rice with whatever she has in her fridge. Going off-script is essential to using up leftovers, and that's a good thing.
18:22 Speaker 02 It ends up being this fun game where you are creating something from what seems like nothing and solving this puzzle, and then you get to eat it. I think the more that you're creative in the kitchen and you take risks and you try new things, the better of a cook you become. And then the more likely you are to get a delicious dish over and over again.
18:38 Speaker 05 And if it doesn't work, well, that's an adventure in its own right.
18:41 Speaker 06 I oversalted the pasta water like three nights ago, and we just all had to suffer through really salty pasta. And I was like, it's so wonderful to know that we can survive eating this too salty pasta.
18:54 Speaker 05 Now, if it's really inedible, I give you permission to toss it and order takeout tonight.
19:02 Speaker 05 So to recap, takeaway one, think of the end of one meal as the beginning of the next. Takeaway two, labeling is your friend. Takeaway three, substitute similar ingredients for each other. Takeaway four, when in doubt, change the texture. And takeaway five, cooking with leftovers should be an adventure.
19:23 Speaker 02 It's kind of a game. You know, it's like your own version of chopped, but hopefully you're not having to put gummy bears in your dinner or something.
19:30 Speaker 05 But you know what? If you want to try it, go for it.
19:41 Marielle Segarra? That was reporter Emily Siner. Do you love Life Kit? Then you need to hang out with us on the NPR app. It's the best way to catch every episode. And if you turn on notifications, we'll let you know the minute a new conversation drops. Download the NPR app and let's keep talking. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Margaret Serino and edited by Sylvie Douglas. Our digital editor is Malika Gharib and our visuals editor is CJ Riechel. Megan Kane is our senior supervising editor and Lauren Gonzalez is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagel and Claire Marie Schneider. Engineering support comes from Sina Lefredo. I'm Mariel Segarra. Thanks for listening.
20:30 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Found. Found provides modern business banking with built in bookkeeping, invoices, contractor payments, and tax tools. Categorize expenses, track receipts, invoice clients, and send payments right where you bank. Join the hundreds of thousands who have already streamlined their finances with Found. Open a Found account for free at found.com. That's F-O-U-N-D dot com. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Lead Bank, member FDIC.
21:05 Speaker 07 This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology. Hosted by Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book, How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, historians, authors, athletes, and more about how to make better decisions to help avoid costly mistakes. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/podcast or wherever you listen.
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