Without much success yet, I must admit…

A key part of this budget is planning well enough that your leftovers all get used. No room for waste. We’re doing well with that, but it can get a bit…boring. I had a minor brainstorm a few days ago and turned leftover brown rice into rather good rice pudding. That was cool. I felt smart. See? Look. Rice pudding.

Yes, it does rather look like a bowl of wet maggots. It's not. It's rice pudding. Food photography is hard and I am lazy.

And then it occurred to me that it was about as obvious a use of the leftovers as the potato scramble was, and that I’m just impossibly slow on the uptake. For an allegedly creative person, I have a hard time re-imagining leftover food as anything other than itself. That is, leftover beans and rice get served again as…beans and rice. You’d think I could at least make some tortillas and chop up some tomatoes and call them burritos, yeah?

In my defense, I think it’s harder for vegetarians to reinvent their leftovers. You meat-eaters eat a roast chicken for dinner, then shred the leftover flesh up with mayo for that salad stuff you seem to like. Then I guess you boil the bones in your cauldron to make stock. Try that with tofu. Yeah. Not so much.

Even with that convenient excuse in my pocket, I’m setting myself a new challenge. You are all my witnesses, and feel free to hold me to it. I hereby declare my intention to get more creative with the leftovers–to actually create meals from them that don’t just feel like reheated virtue. I think I’m going to start with vegetarian chicken pot pie. Mmmmm…pot pie. See, I got this recipe from a friend, and tried it and loved it. LOVED it. And if you check out the comments on the recipe, you’ll see several people suggesting that the stew part of the recipe, sans dumplings, would be perfect pot pie filling. It’s true. That’s exactly what it tastes like.

Mock chicken and dumplings. Also much tastier than the photo would indicate.

Okay…maybe not so creative, as I’m getting the idea from the recipe comments. But hey, baby steps. So I’ll start there. I’ll make the mock chicken and dumplings for dinner one night, then the next day make pot pies from the leftovers, and freeze them to enjoy some week when we haven’t just eaten something so similar. And then we’ll have rice and beans, say, on a Monday and burritos on the Wednesday, and then… And then I’m out of ideas. But I’m going to keep working on it. Suggestions, as always, are most welcome.