Most of you might think this is yucky, but we have tried it an like it ... I encourage you to do the same (if you don't already).
We often have hot cereal for breakfast ... oatmeal, grits, teff, or whatever. But many times we do not finish all that is in the pan. In the past I have tried to add the left-over hot cereal to muffins or quick breads. The flaw in this however is that either 1) I do not feel like making muffins or quick breads right at that moment ... so ... 2) it sits in the fridge, gets forgotten, starts growing and then gets thrown away. I really HATE throwing food away so I always end up feeling bad.
That is until I found a solution!
I now have a 1 gallon sturdy plastic honey jug that I keep in my chest freezer. Whenever there is left-over hot cereal, the breakfast person scrapes the contents of the pan out into the honey bucket in the freezer. This has become our left-over hot breakfast bucket. When it's full, I take it out and put it in the fridge. The next few days we have what looks like slop for breakfast ... but it tastes really good! Best of all, we are using up something that would have eventually been thrown away ... that's almost like having two or three 'free' meals.
We do the same thing for left-0ver broth and veggies ... they have their own bucket and this eventually becomes some sort of soup. If we have a little meat, we might throw that in the bucket too.
That's a good idea. I've heard of the soup saver bucket, but the cereal bit is a new one to me. I hate to waste things, too. ~Liz
ReplyDeleteWe do this with soup all the time. We keep a plastic container of "little bits" of veggies, hash browns, cooked chicken, whatever. When I make a big stew it's fun to "spy" things in the soup. "Oh, I remember when we had those!" I've often heard.
ReplyDeleteLove the hot cereal idea. I mixed grits and cream of wheat the other day when I cooked cereal in the morning, no one could tell I had used both of them!
started doing this... We now have enough grits (only hot cereal we eat right now because of a GF diet) to make another breakfast... After maybe 4 times of saving. Sometimes my HUGE eaters eat it all and want more of something ???? (what do you keep around to fill up growing boys when their appetite takes a leap??) Other times they just have one helping and so there are a lot of left overs... This way I am not wasting it and I suppose I could chisel some of the frozen grits off and reheat it... I think I'll just save it for another meal and pull out a jar of apple sauce (unsweetened of course), fry a few eggs, or give them some nuts...
ReplyDeleteMary - :) I pray you all are doing well 'over there'. Brianna was thinking of writing the girls... do you think they would appreciate that? I'm sure they are getting big!!
ReplyDeleteAmi - are you all on a gf diet? We did this for quite a while and it seemed to help us with our issues. I think it was good to just give our bodies a break, you know? Thankfully none of us have allergies, just sensitivities (spelling?).
Appetites ... I like to have some sort of healthy quick bread on hand for snacks. A good gf 'bread' snack would be rice flour pancakes with peanut butter and bananas or something? We found that brown rice flour works just fine for pancakes instead of wheat flour ... the key is to not over-stir it. Usually towards the end of the batch they start getting flatter and runnier, but oh well ... they still taste good!
My children really enjoy these for snacking.
I pray you all are doing well.
Love, js