Frugal Friday - Recycling Food

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Welcome to our Penny Pincher Series! Today we are going to look at ways to "recycle" your food!

No, I do NOT mean scraping things off the plates after dinner and making them eat it the next time, I mean a creative "re-purposing" of food to make the leftovers seem like a brand new creation!

I have shared a few ideas over the past year --

Like how to turn leftover rice into a dessert or brand new entree and creating pizzas with that 1 cup of meat you have leftover from sandwiches a few days before.

Even making soups! We used to joke at my restaurant: What is tomorrow's soup? Cream of today's special!

You can make a roast chicken for meal #1. What is left after dinner can be pulled off and turned into chicken and dumplings with carrots and pearl onions for meal #2. Boil the carcass to make noodle soup for meal #3. Leftover chicken and dumplings can become creamy chicken a la king over biscuits or chicken pot pies when you add peas for meal #4 and those leftovers can be turned into creamy chicken wild rice soup (by adding cooked wild rice) for meal #5. If you have any soup left, thicken it up a bit and use it as a filling for crepes and you have meal #6. That is six meals from one roasted chicken!

Now, if you do all of those in the same week, not only will your family start to cluck, but they will figure it out, LOL! You want to put a few days in between re-creations to keep them guessing!

Keep in mind that we USED to meal plan around the protein - it was the star of the meal and everything else was simply a supporting cast. They changed the old food pyramid a few years back and we are actually supposed to be eating LESS meat: more grains, veggies and fruits. This means you should be able to stretch that meat further than you thought!

Another great way to recycle leftovers is here. Meats, veggies, and a little cheese is all hidden nicely inside a egg pie!

This should give you a few ideas...what do you do to "recycle" food for your family?

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