How to Make the Most of Your Leftovers

With all the delicious and nutritious meals we’ve been making for Vegan MoFo, I’ve got a fridge full of leftovers… which can get uninspiring when you think about just eating the same thing over and over again, no matter how good it was the first time.

So I’ve been making some meals cobbled together out of the leftover components of other meals, and I’ve turned out some pretty good options.

I’ve been craving nachos, so I took the rest of the filling from the Tomatillo & Poblano Stuffed Arepas, and put it over sweet potato tortilla chips, along with some vegan cheese shreds and jalapeño slices (leftover from the Black Bean Taco Salad with Cilantro & Jalapeño Dressing), freshly sliced green onions & tomatoes from my cousin’s garden, and a good sprinkling of hemp seeds.  It would also have been awesome with some Cashew Sour Cream (from Ashley’s Vegan Cabbage Rolls).

The secret to making leftovers feel like a fresh meal is to add fresh veggies!  The fresh green onions & tomatoes here really made it work for me!

I also love keeping good protein sources on hand for adding to a meal — hemp seeds are great to sprinkle on to salads, or even onto nachos.  You can do the same with leftover cooked beans (in fact, the chickpeas in these nachos came from the Tomatillo & Poblano Stuffed Arepas, which were leftover from the chickpea version of the Taco Salad I had with Heather!), tempeh, tofu, lentils, or even a can of refried beans.

For one of my lunches this week, I took my Ethiopian Lentil Stew and wrapped it up in a gluten-free brown rice tortilla, like a burrito.  Along with a side salad I had another nutritious meal, without even having to get my cutting board dirty.  Perfect!

When Ash and I made the 7-Ingredient Potato Leek Soup, we purposely created leftovers — we boiled extra baby potatoes so we’d have them for Ashley’s Autumnal Quinoa Salad the next day.  And when we whipped up our Collard Wraps with Red Lentil & Caramelised Shallot Pâté, I was so glad to have extra shredded veggies — I had extra beets & carrots on everything the next day, which made all my food look like it was covered in a rainbow!

I think you could make all sorts of amazing combinations with the foods we’ve had in the last couple of weeks:

1. Socca topped with leftover tomato sauce and filling from Ashley’s Cabbage Rolls
2. A gluten-free pita filled with Red Lentil & Caramelised Shallot Pâté and fresh veggies
3. Teff-Chickpea Crêpes filled with scrambled tofu and sautéed collard greens
4. A big salad of shredded Romaine topped with Tomatillo & Poblano filling and Cashew Cream.

What do you love to do with leftovers for a quick & fresh meal? Let us know in the comments!