On a recent weeknight, I opened up my fridge and found an assortment of half-eaten or ignored food.That included takeout that I didn't find appetizing enough to eat for lunch.A rotisserie chicken with most of the meat picked off.
A couple of raw vegetables from the farmers market that were starting to wilt."There's nothing to eat," I told myself.Yet even I knew that was ridiculous.
There was plenty of food in my fridge.I just didn't feel inspired to cook with it.So I asked some chefs for guidance.
How could I more consistently use leftovers and the other ingredients I tend to overlook?Start with a mindset shift, says Margaret Li, chef and co-author of the cookbook Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking.Think about cooking with leftovers as a creative, experimental exercise, not a guilt-driven one."It ends up being this fun game where you are creating something from what seems like nothing and solving this puzzle, and then you get to eat it," she says.There are other good reasons to use up your food scraps.
Nationally, about a quarter of food products go to waste, according to the nonprofit ReFED.In my own household, where we spend about $200 a week on groceries, that means I might be throwing out the equivalent of $50 of food — an unnecessary burden on my wallet, not to mention the environment.The chefs I spoke to had some practical tips about using up more of the food we buy.
Here are a few that I put to the test.Build up an arsenal of go-to recipes that are flexible enough to use up just about any ingredient.Li calls them "hero recipes."I tried one of these from her cookbook, called "Make-It-Your-Own Stir-Fry." (Scroll down for the recipe.) It includes loose ingredients like "1 pound crisp-crunchy vegetables" or "4 cups leafy greens."In the spirit of the recipe, I pulled vegetables out of my fridge at random and did not measure them out.
The sauce was a simple mixture of soy sauce, vinegar, sugar and water.By the tim...