Tips for Eating Leftovers

Episode Transcript

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The Mom Training Podcast with Diana Ballard

 

Diana:   Girl, girl, girl, what we are going to talk about today is going to save you so much time. Now, you might already be a pro at this… You might already be like, “Girl, I got you.” But you would be very surprised that you might be the minority of people that actually do this.

 

   As I study moms, as I’m talking to them, I’m going in their homes, I’m getting to know them, I’m spending time, I am very surprised that this one thing is not something that’s normal in families. Now, there is a lot of money wasted on food. If you go through your finances, you will see, “Oh, my gosh,” like, “Man, this is how much money I spent on food this month.” And if you compare that to other people who might follow this one thing, or food budget or meal plan, you might see that you would be able to save a lot more money.

 

   Imagine if you could save, even just $50 a month, and put it in your savings account, and have the self-discipline not to touch it. I mean, just even $50 a month; what if it was 100 a month? And we’re able to put that money aside… How much stress could you prevent, in the future, by having your little booty?... A little bit more disciplined in your food area; a little bit more organized in your food area, because if we meal plan, we budget, it’s going to save so much money.

 

   So, another thing that’s going to save us a lot more money – with our meal prep, with our budgeting or whatever, is eating leftovers. Now, again, very, very, very surprised, and maybe this is because this is how I was trained growing up; I’ve had a lot of professional training about finances, where they drilled your food. They drilled your food budget. They drilled anything that goes bad in your fridge, “It’s money that you’re just throwing in the trash because we have the money to throw away”. I’m like, “Shoot, I don’t want to throw that money away.”

 

   I mean, if someone took your leftover food, and said, “Okay, his is worth $3, this is worth $5… So, let’s take and throw that $8 in the trash… Like take $8 and throw it the trash and I’ll take your food.” You’d be like, “No! No way man. I’m not throwing $8 in the trash…” But you are. Throwing away the rest of dinner, you’re throwing away money, like massive amounts of money every day.

 

   So, we’re going to try something new here. If you’re not a leftover fan, why? Why are you a leftover fan? Why don’t you like it? Does it taste a little different? Does it not warm up the same? Were you not raised to eat your leftovers? Like, think about why you don’t like eating leftovers… Maybe your husband doesn’t like them. Maybe he wasn’t raised eating leftovers… There’s lots of different reasons.

 

   And I’m not hating on you for it, I’m just saying you’re throwing away lots of money… You’re throwing away a lot of money. “Oh what? We try to eat leftovers and I put it in the fridge, in a container, but then no one ever eats it… Because it’s like eeew… I just don’t want to… I don’t know if I want to warm that up”, or, “It just doesn’t look good to me right now.” And it rots in the fridge, and then we throw it away. Right? And that is more justified than if we just took all the rest of the leftovers, and just shoved them into the trash. Because we’re like, “Oh, it’s still good food, and I just don’t want to just throw it in the trash.” But it’s okay later for us to throw rotten food, rotten leftovers away… You see where the justification is there?

 

   Now, obviously, there are moments that we forget about food. There are moments when, say you’re pregnant in your morning sickness phase, I tell you, I waste so much food in that phase. And I’ve started to get better with telling my husband, “I just want you to know, I can’t touch that.” For some reason, I look at it… It’s almost like it has eyeballs, and claws like I can’t touch it or I’m going to vomit all over the room.

 

   I mean, maybe there are reasons. Maybe you’re going through a really hard time… You know, some things get pushed to the back of the fridge. I mean, it happens all the time. It happens to everybody. But learning to be a little more consistent with eating your leftovers, planning them in, not only is it going to save you money but it’s going to save you massive amounts of time. Massive amounts of time.

 

   So, when I cook, I don’t cook just one meal. It’s always at least two. That I now have accumulated enough glass pans that have lids, of lots of different sizes, that I could split meals up. I can cook a huge, you know, double or sometimes even triple it, my family’s growing… To be able to make two full meals. Maybe we’ll have a little bit of leftovers later, and I make it, we eat it that night, and then maybe two or three days later, we’ll have it again. And then I cook something else the next day… I have a whole meal plan thing set up.

 

   The leftovers are always better when you bake them. We do not have a microwave… I’m just giving you tips here about leftovers. The things that I make, make good leftovers. Now, I can’t think of anything, at the moment, that does not make good leftovers. We do fish. Fish is fine as a leftover… You’re now like, “Oh my god, fish?” Well, I make bomb fish… If you want a good recipe for fish, hit me up. I will bread fish, or chicken, and have that for meals later.

 

   Splitting it up into a separate meal already helps a ton. Being able to just pop it in the oven… Which I will tell you – if you pop a glass pan in a hot oven, that’s from the fridge, like a cold glass pan into the oven, you could shatter it. So, if you’re going to take leftovers out of the fridge to warm up in the oven, you put the glass cold pan in the cold oven, then turn on the oven, and have it preheat together. Just a little tip there.

 

   There are ways to enjoy leftovers and to have it save you so much time, so much money. I personally, love packing my husband’s lunch every day because he is like my human vacuum. And I’ve told him this, so don’t worry, I’m not talking behind his back… Literally, I love making him lunch for work every day because, I’m like, “All right, these leftovers have got to go. He’s going to have a little bit of this, a little bit of that… We’re going to throw in a little bit of this. His main dish is going to be finishing off this.” That’s another way to use leftovers very wisely because I don’t want to be throwing money away, and you don’t either.

 

If we had to throw away all the money that got wasted on food that’s gone bad, gosh, it’d make me cringe. I hate throwing stuff away out of my fridge. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I know that cost me $3.” That $3 we could’ve saved. That $3 could’ve added up. I mean, anything like that could’ve added up over time, and saved our butt. It could’ve paid our mortgage for one month if we were out of a job, which, we had been out of a job.

 

Now, we lost our job, middle of October of 2020. My husband was the main source of income; my money’s on fun. My money’s like, “I’m going to go and get my hair did”, “We’re going to go on vacation.” “I’m going to give $500 to a bum.” I can do whatever I want with it. But my husband pays the bills. And we lost it; we lost our income.

 

And gosh, I’ll tell you what, that saving 50 bucks, that saving $3… That saving anything, covered our butt for a long time, because of the years and years and years of building one little piece at a time. And that’s what our goal is right now. It’s saving anything that we can for a rainy day.

 

Not in like on a poverty mindset. Not like, “Oh, I can’t buy myself a shirt. I can’t buy myself an apple because I just am saving for a rainy day.” No, let’s have some balance here. If you need a shirt, get a shirt. If it’s just like a random shirt that you’re just going to wear once and forget about, then that might be wasting your money.

 

Food is the place where we can cut our expenses, and the main way to do that is to budget, meal plan, and eat your leftovers. Utilize everything that you have. And, I’ll throw this out there, I like to cook with recipes that use the entire onion. Or, I mean, I plan it for another meal that week, like everything is thought out. Because we don’t want to waste food here. We don’t want to waste money. So, let’s save our money by eating the food that we buy. Being intentional for our health and our finances with what we buy. And let’s put away a little bit of money each time that we didn’t waste on food or something dumb.

 

You got this. Go eat those leftovers… You need ideas for cooking your leftovers. Check out our self-care course. Come and learn how to cook nutrition… Awesome. Hang in there momma, you’re doing great, and we’ll see you next week on The Mom Training Podcast.

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