re: What is your households position on left overs? To eat or not to eat?

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I am a firm believer in not wasting food whenever possible.

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Ditto.

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I will take leftovers home from the restaurant.

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Ditto.

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I will keep leftovers from home cooked meals.

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Ditto.

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I am fine with eating the same thing for many meals in a row.

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Ditto.

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The rest of my household is not of the same mindset.

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Ditto.

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I am the only one who goes through the fridge every few days and takes all random leftovers and makes a meal (usually just for me) instead of throwing them away.

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Ditto.

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The rest of my household is fine letting them rot.

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Holy shite man. It’s like we live parallel lives.

I ate Thanksgiving leftovers one time, the day before I left for Christmas Eve.

Waste not, want not.

My wife loves leftoveres. I only like leftover Chinese food and pizza. It's a bone of contention in our house.

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The rest of my household is not of the same mindset

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We all eat leftovers. We have to hide the leftovers from one of mine.

In our house, if we did not eat leftovers, we would starve.

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My son plans his meals out over his work week…down to the grain of rice…so that there is not any waste. Still not sure how he does it.

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Sounds like he is on a much better level with this than I am, but this is very much my goal each week.

Funny enough, Hello Fresh has helped me develop this skill even for my own cooking. They only send you what you need for 2 people, and it never looks like it'll be enough because people aren't used to cooking in such small quantities.. but it's always enough. I've started to shop that way on my own as well.

We typically cook to have leftovers, especially this time of year when it is soup/stew season.

Usually after two meals of the same item, I switch things up and eat a sandwich or just something different before finishing off the leftovers. Some things make it to the freezer, but not that many.

We had a large family. My mother cooked Sunday-Thursday and occasional Friday. Typically Friday and Saturday was “soup and sandwich” days or as my father said “catch as catch can” days.

She cooked for the family. You ate what she cooked and then you ate the leftovers as well. We all ate them and naturally each one had a preference regarding which leftovers they like and which they didn’t but either way they never were leftover long.

She also would put them in smaller containers as they became less and less to make room for the next batch of leftovers. When they were at the very end of anything was left she sorted and frozen.

If it was a piece of a roast, beef, pork, chicken, ham whatever those were frozen together and when she had enough of them she made a huge pot of bbq beef, pork, chicken, ham (and I know ham is pork-the other reference is pork chops, butt etc…) and we had amazing homemade bbq sandwiches.

The rest were divvied up into big zip loc bags and were saved with each of our dogs names on them. As we grew older and moved out whenever we stopped by she had mail, leftovers for us, big ziploc of bones or leftovers for your dog.

My mother never cooked 7 different meals for each kid like plenty of parents I know now. You ate something she cooked or you didn’t eat.

If you wanted something particular you told her and normally she would cook it within the next week provided you didn’t ask her for her fried chicken every single day. (This I tried multiple times so I know for a fact)

So that’s how I grew up and how I eat as an adult and my family is the exact same.

Plus a lot of things are better as leftovers anyway. Soups, beans, gumbos. Spaghetti, (and we ate spaghetti-not pasta) red gravy, cold fried chicken, lightly heated leftover pizza.

Depends on the food.

Left over lasagna/ziti/spaghetti is even better than straight out of the oven IMO.

My wife never finishes her steak. We always take the left overs and make some steak fajitas the next day.

Pizza will go to waste over my dead body.

But my heaviest meal is my 2nd meal of the day. I eat again later in the evening and I'll often have leftovers then for others things if we have them. Which isn't very often.

Chili is a 2-3 day thing for sure.

Fast food I don't do left overs. Maybe a taco bell burrito/soft taco.

My wife saves way more things she claims she will eat but she never does.

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chicken thighs or assorted pork chops and cooking the whole thing for leftovers for lunch all week

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See, this is a leftover I don't like to do. I need something "composed" to eat it leftover. Spaghetti, gumbo, casseroles, soup, etc.

The only way I can eat leftover chicken/pork is if it is getting used in something else composed.

Just took out some bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts to defrost a couple days and marinate in jerk seasoning paste (the thread inspired me), and I was bummed to see it is a big family size package. Already brainstorming how I'll use the rest of the meat to make something else after we have dinner because I'm just not going to microwave bone-in chicken and eat it. The taste gets funky for me.