Lovely Leftovers

Okay, I'm going to admit that one of the ways I get my cooking fix and exist quite happily on a budget is because I like leftovers. I never realized until I was chatting with a friend recently that not everyone likes leftovers. You'd think I'd have wrapped my head around this one a very long time ago, given that my dad is one of those people who doesn't like leftover stuff. One of my mom's sure-fire tricks to go out to dinner was to threaten to heat up all the leftover stuff in the fridge. Or make tuna noodle casserole. But I digress. I clean out Dad's refrigerator all the time, tossing out things I made two weeks earlier or that got dragged home in a carryout box in what must have been a fit of optimism on Dad's part.

Leftovers are part and parcel of my lunches and a good part of dinners almost every week. I think it is only in late summer, when corn and tomatoes are at their best and make a dinner all their own, that I approach actual cooking on a daily basis, and then it is just a matter of heating water to boil some corn and cooking a piece of chicken or fish or broiling up a burger or a chop. Usually I do serious cooking (I do not count making a salad or a vegetable as cooking most of the time) about once or twice a week. I make a couple of main dishes, have it fresh off the stove or out of the oven or crockpot once, and then I reheat.

This week, I wanted to use my Boca bolognese to make baked rigatoni. I mixed the sauce with cooked rigatoni and two kinds of cheese (shredded Parmesan and mozzarella), and then topped it with little spoonfuls of part-skim ricotta and more Parmesan and mozzarella. Threw it in an 8 x 8 pan and baked it till the cheese began to brown and everything was bubbly. Of course, I'd made something else for dinner and it is still waiting in my refrigerator to be portioned out.

My other dish this week is downright sinful. Not something I'll make every week, to be sure. It's salmon noodles romanoff. I mixed cooked, butttered medium egg noodles with sour cream, green onion sour cream chip dip, chives, Parmesan cheese, a beaten egg and a can of drained pink salmon. Topped it with a mixture of plain bread crumbs and Parmesan that I'd tossed with some melted margarine. Baked it until the crumbs were golden brown. I portioned it right out of the oven into plastic containers. Took some to work along with some fresh cherries and that was my dinner.

One of the things that makes leftovers easy for me is a supply of plastic containers. A casserole dish may get neglected, but individual portions make it easy to either reheat at home or to grab and go when I'm heading out the door. They also take up much less room in my refrigerator, which is a good thing. Makes more room for all those jars of mustard and salad dressing and pickles that I am so fond of.