More than ever, no one wants to be wasteful. This is difficult when it comes to food, about 25 percent of which you bring into the house is never eaten. Making a meal with just the right amount of food seems impossible, so what do you do with leftovers? There’s eating them again and again, of course, until it feels like a chore. What are you doing there just reading the paper? You’re supposed to be eating more ham! You can get creative and use leftovers in a new dish. (Put ham in an omelet, but then you’re not using up all that much ham.) The one thing you cannot do in good conscience is toss the ham into the trash.
“The way we deal with leftovers can say a lot about who we are,” a writer in the Times states while delving into the mundane-yet-fascinating topic. Some people obsess over what to do with leftovers. Some people want to give you their leftovers. Leftovers become oft-revisited subjects of family jokes and banter.
I have to agree with the one statement that some foods are better as leftovers; I love pot roast better the second time around, after it’s had an extra day to soak in all the flavor. Pasta that’s been sitting in sauce overnight in the fridge can also be fantastic, once heated up properly. But mostly, I eat leftovers begrudgingly, because to not do so would be wasteful, bad, calamitous.
One major faux pas to avoid when it comes to leftovers: If someone gives you leftovers to take home, it is absolutely, 100 percent your obligation to return the Tupperware the leftovers come in. Singer Patti LaBelle, of all people, heartily agrees:
Readers of Patti LaBelle’s cookbook, “LaBelle Cuisine,” may remember one of that book’s more fraught passages: “It’s not rational I know, but I have a serious thing about my plastic containers. I will give you the food off my stove and shirt off my back, but not my Tupperware! That I want back!” And she went on: “People think I’m kidding when I tell them they have to return it within a week, but I’m not. Just ask my niece Stayce. A month after I’d sent her home with several containers of food, she still hadn’t brought them back. I called her up and had a hissy fit. I must have fussed at Stayce a good 10 minutes before I realized she was crying.”