I’ve never really been a big fan of leftovers.
I’m not sure why that is, but during my formative pre-divorce years, I don’t recall my family ever really eating them. However, I remember surprisingly little from that period of my life.
Once I started living with my Dad though, leftovers became more frequent, but were usually transformed into something unrecognizable from the original meal. Extra roasted chicken would morph into chicken a la king. Oodles of spaghetti sauce became the basis for some seriously sloppy joes. An abundance of mashed potatoes could either be combined to create fishcakes or the crust for a personal nemesis (shepherd’s pie). Even though he had a penchant for scorching food and would probably be the first to admit that he wasn’t a very good cook, my Dad always managed to put enough creative energy into feeding us to ensure that nothing was ever wasted, yet our tastebuds wouldn’t be bored.
And yet somehow, over the years I’ve still only occasionally bothered to reinvent my leftovers into new meals. More often than not I only cook enough for the Everyman and I, or when I’m cooking something slightly larger (like soups, beans or lasagnas) I just freeze the rest until I feel like eating it again. It doesn’t really help that I don’t care for the taste of meat once it’s cooled (particularly poultry) which is a quirk I cannot explain but developed when I was a small child. As best I can describe it, the food tastes like “fridge” to me after it’s cold and has always held little to no appeal for revisiting afterwards. Inevitably, it just ends up hanging out at the back of the fridge until I remember to throw it out.
But obviously that’s wasteful, not to mention incredibly stupid.
