Fried rice, bread pudding and homemade broth all start with ingredients many people throw away. Life Kit looks at how rethinking leftovers can change the way you cook.
ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
Food waste is a major issue in the U.S. The latest estimate from the nonprofit ReFED is that a quarter of all food products get thrown out. Cooking with leftovers can help you reduce waste and get more bang for your buck at the grocery store. But Life Kit contributor Emily Siner found that it also can make cooking just a lot more fun. She talked to some chefs about changing the way we think about leftovers.
EMILY SINER: When Margaret Li was a kid, she observed her mother doing something unusual.
MARGARET LI: She used to like to save takeout sauces from every restaurant. So she would have ketchup from one restaurant, barbecue sauce from another restaurant, maybe some kind of soy sauce or duck sauce from a Chinese restaurant.
SINER: And then she would mix them all together and use this super sauce to cook a chicken.
LI: Honestly, it was usually really good.
SINER: Years later, when Li and her sister wrote a cookbook called “Perfectly Good Food,” they dedicated it to their mom and her rescuing of takeout sauces because this was a formative lesson. It showed them that you can find creative ways to use up just about any ingredient in your kitchen.
TAMAR ADLER: I don’t think there’s almost anything in my kitchen that isn’t made out of something else.
SINER: Tamar Adler is a chef and author of “The Everlasting Meal,” and her whole cooking philosophy is that leftovers and the odds and ends of ingredients are just as valuable as anything else you cook with. Or put a different way – the end of one meal is the beginning of the next. Maybe you have some leftover rice lying around from earlier in the week. Adler says rice that’s old is actually ideal for making fried rice.
ADLER: I will, you know, saute some aromatics, so maybe some ginger, garlic, onion. And then if I have rice, I will add rice to that, and then whatever other leftover bit there is. So maybe there’s, like, a little bit of beans left.
SINER: And just because the meal is built from leftovers doesn’t mean Adler treats it like a second-class dish. She gives these ingredients new life in their new form.
ADLER: Making it more flavorful and crispy and then spicy and then usually adding, like, a squeeze of lemon.
SINER: It’s all about building up your arsenal of go-to recipes that are flexible enough to use up just about any ingredient. For example, Li saves all the ends of bread, puts them in a freezer bag. And when it’s full, you’ve got the foundation of a savory bread pudding.
LI: You soak your bread in milk or cream, and you add in eggs, and I like to add in all the different cheese bits that I can find from forging my fridge. And then it can take just about any other meat or vegetable that you can think of. Generally, I just saute them with maybe onions and olive oil, and then you pile it all into a casserole dish. And you bake it for about an hour, and it is so delicious.
SINER: Li says once you get the hang of using more of your food, it just makes this daily chore of feeding yourself easier. Mushy blueberries can go into the freezer to be turned into a smoothie or saved in the fridge for muffins. Cheese rinds and carrot peels get turned into broth. The stalks of herbs – they taste pretty much the same as the leaves when they’re blended up into a pesto or herb oil.
ADLER: And so I would never throw those things out. They’re so good.
SINER: Built into this philosophy is that cooking with leftovers should be an adventure. Going off script is essential to using up ingredients, and that’s a good thing.
LI: I think the more that you’re creative in the kitchen and you take risks and you try new things, the better of a cook you become.
SINER: And if your attempt to use leftovers is really inedible, well, I give you permission to toss it and order takeout tonight. For NPR News, I’m Emily Siner.
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