Are you creative in minimizing food waste?

Had lunch with my sister today. We started talking about our grandparents who had experienced poverty as kids, so they always preached against food waste. My grandma would get short with me if we were making cookies and I left any batter in the bowl - one example.

So my sister and I were trading tips - how to label leftovers in the freezer etc. - especially soups or meat, etc.
Then I told her about the JM sub sandwich shops and how I always
have leftovers...but you can't do anything about that because...well, they are sandwiches.
Then my sister laid it on the line - how to preserve leftover sandwiches..omg.
She orders or makes hers without any dressing or liquids....
She only adds mayo or dressing to the sandwich, one section at a time....
when she is full, she separates the meat & cheese off, wraps it in foil, wraps the bread and then
the next day she can make a decent not soggy sandwich with the leftovers.
I never would have thought of this....
she is careful with money....that's how she has ended up with lots of it lol.

One thing I am careful to do is with fresh produce - that gets eaten first....the end of the week before a grocery run, I am down to frozen veggies lol.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/04/2026 08:46PM by BarefootBliss.

I was raised in a "pretending to be middle class" situation. I learned a lot of tricks to turn a relatively expensive piece of protein into a lot of meals. Even though we aren't in that kind of situation now, old habits prevail and we do everything possible to avoid waste. Even scraps are chicken feed or compost. I have a ham bone in a pot right now making stock and then everything I strain out goes into the Mill for grinding/drying and will be food for the landscaping. Most people would throw that bone in the trash, I think. But it had one more dinner with leftovers on it.

I am pretty creative with a leftover rotisserie chicken, now that I think about it.

The only way I've used leftover ham bones is to make bean soup....but your comment is very interesting to me.

I almost always have leftovers from my fine dinner shops. I actually plan my ordering that way. I may fill up on salad and appetizers, then take half of my entree and sides for another meal.

I hate when I go out to eat with people who leave a lot of food on the plate. It seems so wasteful.

I often freeze small amounts of meat or veggies to be used later, perhaps in soups or salads.

Occassionally when I visit TRH, I order the big steak salad. I will ask for a to-go box upfront and split my salad before I add dressing (and also remove the croutons).Otherwise, I am left with half of a soggy salad.

Nowadays, there are so many people ordering takeout that every restaurant has small containers with lids for leftover sauces. You only have to ask.

I don't eat bread, but I take home any leftover and hubby eats it later. TRH is good about giving extra rolls if you ask for them.

There is a local BBQ restaurant I visit that offers a salad bar as a side. I always load up with the grilled chicken, cherry tomatoes, and broccoli. I don't add dressing but eat the ingredients individually as appetizers, then take home the rest. The leftover chicken goes into a freezer bag and eventually becomes chicken tortilla soup.

When I do certain burger places, I order the burger plain, then later chop up the meat, put into freezer bags, and then have hamburger soup later on.

One local burger bar that I do requires me to order an appetizer. They have a large loaded queso that we will eat a little of, then take the rest home. They will always give a fresh bag of tortilla chips for the asking.

I track my grocery spend and it is very small but we eat well. I follow a low carb diet with little or no fried foods or processed food. My husband, on the other hand, eats what he wants.

I save all the ketchup packets I receive and use them for shrimp cocktail.

Tomorrow, I will be using leftover rice from a Panda shop to make stuffed green peppers.(On sale for .33 each).

To me , it is fun seeing how much I can do with leftovers and being thrifty.

I love the idea to use leftover Panda rice for stuffed green peppers!!!! I will do this!

My grandma was amazing. She did this ALL of her life, she was a Great Depression kid, actually young adult by the time it was in full swing (she married grandpa when they were both 20 years old in 1937). A single chicken, fed her family of 5, for 5 days. The first day it was roasted, Grandma ate a wing (each person, including Grandpa and her growing sons got ONE piece of chicken), and vegetables she grew in her garden, she NEVER bought vegetables at the store, she used part of the drippings from the roasting pan to make gravy to put on potatoes (that she also grew), the rest was put in a container in the refrigerator. That night she broke down the remaining 4 pieces of chicken (yes, there were 4 pieces left the way she cut it up), she put the bones in the pressure cooker with some leftover vegetables, salt, pepper, etc. and made what she called "stock" I call it bone broth. That was strained, and either canned or refrigerated. The next night was what she called "chicky bites", the meat from one of those pieces of chicken, with gravy, corn and peas, over stale bread torn into bites. The third meal was chicken and dumplings. Another piece of chicken, some of the stock, stew veggies (potatoes, carrots, celery) and big fat biscuit dumplings that made the broth into gravy. Then there would be a family sized pot pie, and a pot of chicken noodle soup, with homemade noodles of course.

She did something similar with every piece of meat that she had. One slice of bacon is enough to flavor an entire pot of beans, but I prefer smoked hog jowls, they are far less expensive. The only time we had actual ham at her house was in a pot of beans on New Year's Day. I have NEVER liked ham, but she thought it was a treat, I guess in her world it was.

She taught me to can vegetables, make jelly and jam. She canned stock, or bone broth for storage, not in quart jars, but in pint jars, because you can always add water to make it go further. They would go fishing once a month while Grandpa was still working, they would catch salmon and smoke it. They would catch ocean perch, filet it and freeze it in old paper milk cartons, I would talk her out of one of the milk cartons with perch in it every time we went to visit. They had an old Norge chest freezer from the early 1950's that took 4 adult hefty men to move, and when grandpa decided he wanted to downsize he gave it to me, and I used it for another 30 years, and it still worked when I sold it for $100 to someone who wanted to fix it up because it was old.

There is a lot of food that moves in and out of my house now, none of it really goes to waste, because when it's past it's prime and I don't want to eat it, there are 100 chickens out in the yard that will eat it. The only trash that leaves my property is plastic waste, and I do my very best to make sure I bring as little of that home as possible. I would love to be as frugal as Grandma was, and I know that I CAN do it, but I don't.

Wow....great ideas here in black belt level food preservation and preventing waste.

@BarefootBliss wrote:

I am pretty creative with a leftover rotisserie chicken, now that I think about it.

The only way I've used leftover ham bones is to make bean soup....but your comment is very interesting to me.

I didn't really do this until I got a pressure cooker. Now I make stock/bone broth routinely. One hour at high pressure, strain, refrigerate, remove the solid fat layer. Meat jello. I have one big enough to put a whole turkey carcass in, splurged on a beast of a Kuhn Rikon "like new" from Amazon.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/05/2026 03:51PM by Deedeezthoughts.

I do most of what ShopperGirly does. I will usually order a meal that comes with sides and save half of it for a future meal.

We went to the museum last week, I packed lunches for my kids and I brought the mustard packets from our Sam's club hot dog runs because I knew if I put the mustard on the sandwich, it'd probably make it soggy.

Since my kids are in sports, we have a lot of nights we cook once and eat twice, like a pot of spaghetti. I'll freeze some of the sauce so we can have it another time. Then I just try to rotate through fridge, pantry, freezer frequently so things don't wind up going bad if they get shoved in the back of the cabinet. It also helps me know what we have, so I don't buy stuff I already have.

Not wasting food has been my New Year's resolution. In my case, it's mostly learning not to buy too much.
50km to the grocery store, so not wasting gas because we need something. That makes it tempting to keep the pantry and fridge very well stocked. What is someone stops by ? And we enjoy trying new recipes and it's nice to have EVERYTHING on hand. But condiments, seasonings get old.

I've started not replacing every single item as it runs out or is about to run out.

Twice last week a recipe I tried required Chinese 5 spice. (Which I hadn't replaced) I found I had ingredients to make it. And it was good.

Yesterday, I simmered the ribs for 30 minutes before cooking them in the sauce. I skim off the fat and that pork broth will become war won ton soup. Usually without the won ton wrappers, just little pork meat balls.

I always use the chicken/turkey carcass.

One tip I can add is radish leaves make good pesto. I'm sure they could also be added to some salads. They are rough and have to be well washed.

Fennel fronds seem to be tossed, often even before they get put on the store shelf. They can also be used; in the fennel salad, in soup, stew.

Broccoli stalks get chopped and sold as broccoslaw. But you can do it yourself.

It's tough to find broccoli that still has stalks here. I do buy the broccoli slaw that they sell at Kroger because Kroger only sells broccoli crowns fresh in the produce dept. Kinda pisses me off, I like the stems better than the flowers.

I just ordered a whole new batch of seeds. Me yelling at the wall that is my son: I will have a garden this year, and you will put my greenhouse up before February so that I can get my seeds started early enough. I'm going to try, or I'm going to have to find a way to pay someone to put it up for me. I'm not going to spend all of my grocery money on vegetables this year.