I know most of us have found ourselves still drowning in food and extra ingredients at home after the Christmas and New Years festivities are over.
And you certainly should try to use them up rather than buying in new groceries and eventually binning the previous ones you spent a pretty penny on.
Here are some of the extra ingredients we had after the festivities and what we did with them. You might want to share your ideas with us too.
Cheese: grated, bagged and frozen for later use in cheese sauces
Cranberry sauce: a great accompaniment to crackers
Crisps: these, when crushed, make a delicious coating for oven cooked chicken
Chocolate: we haven’t done this yet but there are lots of recipes out there to use the leftover chocolate bars to make cakes. Check out this one from our friendly rival, Kelly. The excess chocolate can also be used in chocolate sauces and even to flavour custard.
Red wine: Perfect for soaking your dried fruits and mixed peel for Christmas puddings and cakes (yes!)
In general, we tried to make sure that leftover foods were used up in a timely manner or were properly cooled down, packaged and frozen for later use.
Here are some of the meals we planned for the weeks after Christmas
Chicken curry with rice
Jacket potatoes with cheese and coleslaw
leftover New Year’s dinner 
Roast beef butty with Cheese, tomato slices and cranberry sauce
fish pies
Mushroom Risotto
All in all, we have plans to reign in the spending after Christmas so, outside of vital necessities, we will not be spending any money over January. Wish us luck.
Aldi is doing a great job with its Super Six fruit and vegetables and if you are creative enough, you can plan and execute some super frugal recipes.
We are sharing our meal planning ideas weekly with Katy Kicker and other friends. We hope you can join in too.
I am doing the no spend January as much as possible as well so we are eating leftovers like crazy!
Your wallet would be happy for it. All the very best with it. We are cheering you on.
This is just what I needed this week!
Let’s hope it works for you.
Good list for ideas. We don’t realise that often thinking outside the square can
bring up some true resourcefulness 🙂 Thanks!
Deborah recently posted…Making Your Home All About You
I’d say one of my strong points at home is being resourceful in the kitchen! I just have the knack of creative some really tasty dishes even when the cupboards are almost bare!
We’ve used all of our leftovers up now. So glad that we froze and stored items well, rather than having food waste.
Some great tips there on using up leftovers.
Sounds like you had some great meals lined up for this week too 🙂
I’m sure glad you found the tips useful. It always amazes us that we save so much money by refrigerating or freezing leftovers! Try it for yourself and you will see.