Our Top 5 Tips For Stopping Food Waste with Lots Of Odds and Ends Meal Plans

See our It’s A Guy Stir-Fry recipe to use up all of the week’s leftover veggies and protein!  

I wanted to share some quick tips with you about menu preparation, meal planning, or meal creating.

Like I shared a couple of days ago, I am getting ready to share my “No Food Waste Menu Planning” free download HERE.  But before I do, I wanted to share some tips to make your planning better along with the Google Recipes search article HERE that I already shared! 

These are my tips, but these are not the only tips! Please share your tips too so that we can all be that much better about not wasting food and having healthy, easy meals for our families!

So here’s a list of my tips:

Save your proteins and veggie leftovers for and end of the week stir-fry, soup, stew, fajitas/enchiladas, casserole or chili. 

1. Examples: I will save leftover steak, roast or chicken for an easy chili by throwing in cans of beans, tomatoes corn and more.  I have shared this recipe idea with my Rachel Ray Inspired Cowboy Chili.
2. I will save leftover veggies for stir-fry with a bit of sauce or even protein of some sort and cook up in olive, sesame seed or coconut oils with a bit of salt and pepper and other spices/herbs and serve over brown rice using our Bragg’s liquid aminos as a soy sauce substitute.  This is very easy and we have shared this idea in our “it’s a guy stir-fry.”
3. I will often “stuff” the left over proteins and veggies in tortillas and cover with an enchilada or other tomato based mexican sauce.  I have shared an example of this with my beef an potato enchiladas using leftover roast and potatoes.
4. Finally, you can throw your proteins and veggies in a bowl and make a cream based soup or sauce with our SOS mix and add a bit of salt and pepper, soy and worcestershire sauce and mix up and then spread in a casserole dish and cover with a topping and bake.  I don’t think I have shared a recipe related to this, but I just did one last week! I had leftover steamed carrots, corn, broccoli, and peas from the week that I collected and saved over each meal.  I didn’t have any left over protein last week, but I just used some of my pre-cooked chicken and threw it all in a bowl together (and I also added some diced frozen onion!).  I then made a cream of mushroom soup with my SOS mix.  I mixed the soup into the bowl with the veggies/chicken and added some soy sauce (we use Bragg’s liquid aminos instead), sour cream and worcestershire sauce with salt and pepper.  Stirred until well mixed.  I then placed in greased casserole dish and topped with crushed crackers and french’s fried onions and baked at 400 degrees until brown and bubbly! IT WAS DELICIOUS!!  I was able to use all leftover food, including remaining crushed saltine crackers.  You can make a casserole out of pretty much anything, mixed with any sauce and topped with any topping! It is very simple!
5. Freeze the left over veggies and proteins and then throw them all in your soup, stir-fry, chili, casserole or stew.

Use your remaining fruits before your next shopping trip by making an end of the week fruit salad.  You can even mix this up with lots of ideas! Here are some of my ideas and examples.

1. Mixed your diced fruit with any or all of the following:
   1. Shredded coconut
   2. Marshmallows
   3. Cinnamon
   4. Plain yogurt with vanilla extract, or vanilla or other flavored yogurts (this is a great way to also use up any yogurt you have before it goes bad too!)
   6. Whipped topping or whipped cream.

Find recipes using Google Recipe search that we talked about in our previous Google Recipe search how-to tutorial article. 

BTW- this is the rice cooker I use, which is also a steamer and  crockpot.  This little appliance has saved us hundreds of dollars and hours of dinner, lunch and even breakfast ease! We eat rice for breakfast – see our Savory Brown Rice Breakfast HERE and our Sweet Brown Rice Breakfast HERE.  You can see this rice cooker on Amazon HERE.  It is worth EVERY PENNY and comes very highly recommended! I use it at least 5 times per week! I cook rice, quinoa, beans and much more in it! 

Without giving it much thought, just wake up and throw some meat in a crock pot and rice in the rice cooker – you can come up with sauces and add-ins later…. but then at least you are committed to making something. 

In this case, very often your protein covered in sauce over rice.  I do this a lot, to not only use-up all of our food, but to make less excuses for getting something out or picking something up 🙂 I have talked about that before too in our article on Making Your Wife, Your Hubby and Your Budget Happy!

Know that you can make a quick sauce out of anything.  Even if you had chicken every single night, you can make it different every time just with the sauce you cook it in or add on top!  Here’s ideas on things you can use as sauces:

1. Our biggest and BEST suggestion is to always have a batch of SOS mix on hand! This mix is a miracle mix and gives you innumerable different meals without the fuss, hassle and cost of carrying several different types of sauces.  Read up on all of the SOS Mix ideas we have shared (this isn’t all you can do, just what we have actually written about :)).
2. Italian and other oil based dressings make perfect sauces.
3. You can also make a sweet and savory sauce using leftover jams, jellies and preserves! Just add a bit of water or broth and bring to a boil and add garlic (minced or powder), basil, oregano, soy sauce and worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper and it makes for a nice sweet and savory sauce over most any protein! Give it a try and don’t let your preserves even go to waste!
4. Finally, a sauce of only olive/coconut/sesame oil with salt and pepper and other spices with soy and/or worcestershire sauce is often more than enough needed to have a tasty protein topper!

With that, I suggest that you print these tips to be put in your home binder! Details on the Home Binder with FREE downloads are HERE.

See all articles on this topic at Menu Planning page HERE.