Reduce food waste, save money: Leftovers

Cooking large quantities of food is great when you're time poor. Unfortunately it is all too easy to forget about the leftovers and leave them languishing in the back of the fridge.

A big problem with leftovers is that after eating the same thing for a couple of nights you can get pretty sick of it. One way to avoid this is to come up with some ways that you can add interest to your leftover meals. Whether it be adding extra flavours, textures or accompaniments, just a little bit of effort can increase your excitement about using leftovers and help you to cutdown on the amount of food you're wasting.

It's a good idea when you're making a big batch of something to plan a few ways that you can make the leftovers more interesting. Here are some ideas:

• Make an interesting sauce or chutney to serve with your food. It's great to have a few of these on hand in your pantry if you can e.g. pickled eggplant or cabbage, spiced labne (easy to make at home from yoghurt), onion jam, tomato relish.

• Add a tin of beans or chickpeas to leftover curry or stew to add extra texture.

• Spiced rice can make a curry more interesting, or try serving it with a different grain each night e.g. couscous, quinoa or millet.

• Turn leftover rice into fried rice or a rice salad by adding some chopped vegies and dressing.

• Leftover risotto can be shaped into patties then fried until crisp and brown. Serve with tomato relish and salad or as a burger in a bun.

• Turn leftover stirfry into a cold noodle salad by adding cucumber and lettuce, and a soy and rice wine based dressing.

• Make a different dressing to change the flavour of leftover salad e,g, if you went for a vinegar based dressing the first night try a creamy yoghurt sauce or tahini dressing. Also try adding roasted nuts or fresh herbs.

• Add to the flavour of soups by swirling through a mint or basil pesto, some spicy harissa or adding cheese. Parmasen is a classic but crumbled feta or blue cheese can work well too.

• Use stale bread to make croutons to add crunch to soups and salads. Try frying the croutons with garlic or chilli for extra flavour.

• Pancakes can be a good way to serve leftovers. Just make a batch of pancakes, wrap the leftovers up in them, then you can serve as they are or put them in the oven for 15 minutes to crisp up. You might like to serve them with yoghurt (for curries) or else a tomato based sauce and cheese, it all depends on what will work with the leftovers you're using. Flat breads can be used in a similar way.

• If all else fails and you just can't face eating the same food again, many meals can be frozen and eaten at a later date.

What are you favourite and most flexible leftovers?