Are you using your leftovers to their full potential?

When I think of leftovers, I'm always reminded of the week after Thanksgiving as a kid where dinner for the next 5-7 days consisted of something from the Thanksgiving dinner. I mean after all, there are a wide variety of recipes that use chicken, and turkey can certainly be substituted in most instances; so the possibilities are endless. While this idea wasn't bad in theory, it certainly could have been handled better by freezing some of the leftovers instead of trying to eat them all before they went bad in the refrigerator.

Our family didn't start out using the freezer method, but we've really started focusing on being economical both with our grocery budget and with the groceries once we start using them. We started out using the refrigerator to store leftovers, but found we were consistently throwing things out because the leftovers just didn't go with any other meal we were cooking that week, or because there wasn't enough to serve with a meal.

My aha moment came one night when we had left over chicken and gravy. I had the idea to dice up the chicken and throw that in with the gravy to use for chicken pot pie since we always have some type of frozen vegetable and then make biscuits from scratch to put on top. I knew that I wasn't brilliant by any means, but I had finally made the breakthrough in figuring out that I can put it in a bag and store it in the freezer until we were ready to eat the leftovers. We are a lot more resourceful with our food now, and I love figuring out new ways to use our leftovers. The only thing I have to remember is to label the freezer bag so I can remember what's in there.