Jazzing Up Leftovers

A lot refrigerators are packed with leftovers. While most of us hate to let food go unused, the only option is to use up food we couldn't finish a few days previous and prepare dinner out of leftovers. While leftovers were once a flavorful meal, unfortunately, to many family members they are no longer appealing. Fear not, with just a few suggestions, you can cook yummy meals yet again merely by using leftovers. Here are some hints.

Mix Your Leftover Meat Dishes with Fresh Pasta

One way to revamp a great meal out of your leftovers is to mix it with fresh ingredients. In this case, pasta works good with lots of different beef and chicken dishes. Use thin spaghetti, wide noodles, wagon wheels, spirals, you name it with your meat leftovers. Add gravy, ketchup, tomato sauce or even chili to spice up and old dish.

Vegetable Dishes with Rice- Twice as Nice

If you have leftover vegetable dishes that you would like to reuse, one of the best ways to do so is to prepare it with rice. Whether you choose white or brown rice, you can cook a great vegetable alternative and make it into an entirely new meal. Usually with vegetables, you have little opportunity to reuse them as leftover before they become mushy. Strive to keep them crisp and fresh.

Create Soups with Leftovers

If you are stuck with a few meals in your refrigerator and you don’t know how to use them, you can always toss them into a pot and make delicious soup. Whether it is chicken, turkey, hamburger meat or beef, making flavorful soup out of leftovers makes sense and also is quite good.

Preparing soups using leftover is extremely painless. You can pretty much toss in any sliced meat and chopped vegetable into some broth or cream to create an awesome tasting soup. Even old bread can be useful.

Use Leftover Fruit for Fruit Smoothies

In general, many homes will have a couple leftover apples, oranges or bananas in their refrigerator. While the occasional piece of fruit is not generally a leftover, practically all fruit can be used to make tasty fruit smoothies. Fruit smoothies are easily prepared with some milk, yogurt, fruit and a blender. Not only are they high in nutritional value, but ideal for a snack or even breakfast. Fruit smoothies are ideal for leftover fruit or even slightly over ripen fruit. Mixed with many other ingredients, they still taste great and won’t go unused.

The next time you look deep into your refrigerator and see all the meals from the past week, don’t fret, use them to recreate new meals, soups and even yummy desserts.