Wherever there is food, there is bound to be leftover too in some quantity. The general household practice is to put the consumable leftover into the cool preserve of the refrigerator. On a commercial level, say at restaurants, hotels, and mess, they have big freezing boxes to store the unused food or if unusable, it goes into waste. However, by exercising a little caution and creativity, we can minimize the leftover from turning into waste. The situation is trickier when the food platter is half-eaten. Be it a home or eatery, such leftovers have no other place but to be thrown into a trash bin. Only good judgment at the time of serving can prevent this kind of wastage. For other situations, food waste may be checked with a little ingenuity.
Look at your leftover every day
An ideal way is to look into your freezer every morning for the leftovers, and plan the meal for the day so that either the leftovers are consumed first or used in preparations of the other dishes for the day. Surprisingly, this small practice saves money in tons over a period of time, and far more importantly it reduces the output of food waste to a great deal.
Learn to Reuse
Culinary experts have many tricks up their sleeve to transform refrigerated leftover food into mouthwatering delicacies. They can treat boiled rice into delicious rice pulao or jeera rice. Meticulous housewives know how to rework the leftover curry with fresh spices and condiments so that it becomes a new treat on your plate the next morning at breakfast. Even leftover bread crumbs and dry vegetables can be cooked together by expert hands to create a new flavor.
Weekly leftover day
Every household should make it a practice to allocate a day every week for cleaning up their refrigerators. Even those, who have little time to experiment with food, can simply empty their refrigerator of the leftover, heat or recook it and eat it. Not only will this practice relieve your overstuffed fridge, but it will also help dispose of the leftover in the most suitable manner.
A stitch in time saves nine
So it is more of a habit and attitude which needs to be changed if we want to protect leftovers from becoming food waste. Once the mind is set to use and consume leftovers, we can easily devise ways to deal with them. Leftovers are a regular phenomenon and we can’t wish them away. Being a perishable commodity, it is bound to be a waste if not reused in time. But what uses is culinary expertise and various kitchen gadgets if we have to bear with the losses incurred by throwing away leftovers into the waste bins?
