Day 1: Spaghetti with homemade pasta sauce (frozen from summer), Garlic bread, Tossed salad
Day 2: Baked ham, Mashed potatoes, Roasted Delicata squash, Balsamic roasted brussels sprouts with cranberries
Day 3: Homemade pizza, Spinach salad
Day 4: Vegan Shepherd’s pie
Day 5: Farmer’s casserole
Day 6: Crockpot ham and bean soup
Day 7: Fridge dump
Notes: Cooking with Leftovers
This week is all about traditions and leftovers. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that 31% of the food supply in the US is wasted. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has calculated the amount of food waste at 218.9 pounds per person every year. For an average family of 4 that comes out to 875.6 pounds of wasted food per year!! Why do we waste so much energy, land, water, money and labor on something that will just be thrown away? I know we can do better.
One way my family prevents food waste is to meal plan. Having a plan for each and every piece of food that enters your house (and then sticking to it) is key to stopping this garbage dump.
Now, things are a little different around the holidays. People tend to make larger portions than usual and go all out with a huge piece of meat and tons of side dishes. To be honest, this is one of my favorite things! A celebration just isn’t merry for me without all the fixings. We do celebrate Christmas in our household and every Christmas Eve we cook a big spaghetti dinner and then finish off the night with games and grasshoppers (the ice cream drink). Then, on Christmas day we typically have a ham, mashed potatoes, and a few other vegetables and sides. We end up with leftovers for days, and that is okay! The second way I reduce food waste is to get creative with the leftovers.
Here is how I’m dealing with our leftovers this week: We don’t have spaghetti very often so the leftovers are like gold to my family and are eaten up for lunches pretty quickly. The ham, on the other hand, will stick around for awhile. The good thing is that it will last several days in the fridge since it is full of so much salt! If you have a ham or turkey, I recommend you chop up your leftover meat right away so that it is easy to plunk into whatever you are making. For me this week, that will be a farmer’s casserole and some soup. Really there are so many different ways to make casseroles and soup that the options are endless. For the vegetables, you can put them on pizza (I plan to put extra squash on mine), toss with a salad, add to soup, or, same with meat, plunk into a casserole. I don’t really care for reheated mashed potatoes, but when you put them on a Shepherd’s pie, they are really good. My version is vegan, made with mushrooms and lentils instead of ground beef. So delicious!
So what about the leftovers of the leftovers?!? Well, my last trick to avoid food waste is to do a big fridge dump at the end of the week. A fridge dump is when you don’t plan anything at all, but have everyone in the family choose something, anything from the fridge to make into a meal. My kids have been pretty creative with this in the past, making veggie quesadillas, fancy sandwiches, and stirring leftover cranberry sauce into yogurt. The idea is to find anything that is going to spoil and eat it up now.
So to summarize, here are the three ways that I do my part to prevent food from ending up in the garbage.
- Meal plan
- Get creative with leftovers
- Do a fridge dump at the end of the week
How about you? What do you do with your holiday meal extras?
Wishing all my readers laughter, joy, and leftovers. May your kitchen be filled with delicious smells and your bellies full of all good things. Happy holidays everyone!
