Tired of eating leftovers? Turn your odds and ends into creative meals

Summary

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Life Kit: "Tired of Eating Leftovers? Turn Your Odds and Ends into Creative Meals"

Host: Marielle Segarra
Guests: Margaret Lee (Cookbook Author, "Perfectly Good Food"), Tamar Adler (Author, "The Everlasting Meal")
Air Date: June 11, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this practical and encouraging episode, Life Kit investigates how to creatively transform leftovers and those kitchen odds and ends into delicious meals—saving money, time, and the planet. Host Marielle Segarra, along with guest reporter Emily Siner, interviews culinary experts Margaret Lee and Tamar Adler for actionable tips, personal stories, and inventive strategies that make "rescuing" food feel easy and fun—not a chore.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Shifting Perspective: Leftovers as Opportunities

• Personal Story: Margaret Lee recalls her mother's “sauce collecting” habit—combining various takeout packets into a surprisingly tasty barbecue sauce for chicken. This fueled Margaret’s lifelong belief that “you don’t always need a recipe to make something delicious.” (00:30–01:01)
• Mindset: Don’t see leftovers as sad or boring, but as beginnings for new dishes:
  • "In other words, think of the end of one meal as the beginning of the next." – Emily Siner (04:55)

2. Build an Arsenal of ‘Hero’ Recipes

• Hero Recipes: Flexible dishes you can adapt with whatever you’ve got—bread puddings, frittatas, fried rice, galettes, and more.
  • "You soak your bread in milk or cream, add in eggs, and I like to add in all the different cheese bits that I can find from foraging my fridge... then you pile it all into a casserole dish and bake it... and it is so delicious." – Margaret Lee (07:01–07:26)
• Staples Are Key: Always have onions, garlic, rice, pasta, and eggs on hand to give structure to meals from scraps. (07:28–08:10)

3. Organization: Label, Date, and Designate

• Label Everything: Use painter’s tape and a Sharpie to mark what’s in containers and when it was made—especially essential for the freezer.
  • “You always think you’ll remember, but often you don’t.” – Margaret Lee (09:48)
• Special Zones: Margaret keeps an “Eat Me First” box in her fridge for small portions and half-used ingredients. Tamar repackages everything into her own containers for psychological curb appeal. (10:51–11:50)

4. Get Creative with Substitutions

• Ingredient Swapping: Don’t be afraid to sub similar items, even without a recipe’s blessing.
  • "You can substitute similar ingredients for each other, even without knowing a technique." – Tamar Adler (14:36)
  • E.g., Use burrata as a creamy base, swap out cabbage for collards in slaw, or use tomatoes in place of tomato paste and vice versa. (14:24–15:31)

5. Change the Texture

• Revive or Reimagine: Wilted lettuce? Plump it in ice water—or turn it into soup or stir-fry.
  • "You can sort of change the texture totally. So you could make a lettuce soup. You could make stir fried lettuce." – Margaret Lee (16:28)
• Herb Stems: Puree stems into pesto or herb oil instead of tossing them. (16:58)

6. Storage Tips for Longevity

• Moisture Management: Place a paper towel or cloth in bags of greens to keep them fresher, longer. Adjust dryness or dampness depending on the produce.
  • “Managing the right moisture and humidity for things.” – Margaret Lee (17:36)

7. Embrace Experimentation

• Cooking as a Game: Risk and creativity go hand in hand; not every experiment will work, but your cooking skills will grow.
  • "It ends up being this fun game where you are creating something from what seems like nothing and solving this puzzle and then you get to eat it." – Margaret Lee (18:20)
  • "I over salted the pasta water like three nights ago and we just all had to suffer through really salty pasta. And I was like, it's so wonderful to know that we can survive eating this too salty pasta." – Tamar Adler (18:39)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Food waste, in some ways is this trendy new idea, but for many thousands of years, that was just cooking. You just used up what you had."
  – Margaret Lee (01:56)
• "I don't think there's almost anything in my kitchen that isn't made out of something else."
  – Tamar Adler (05:04)
• “I always have some painter’s tape and a good Sharpie in my kitchen, so you can label and date things.”
  – Margaret Lee (09:33)
• "Cooking with leftovers should be an adventure."
  – Emily Siner (17:56)
• “It's kind of a game, you know, it's like your own version of Chopped, but hopefully you're not having to put gummy bears in your dinner or something.”
  – Margaret Lee (19:21)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:30–01:01] Margaret Lee’s formative “leftover sauces” story
• [04:35–04:55] Turning leftover odds and ends into dinner
• [05:10–05:51] Tamar Adler's burrata salad transformation
• [07:01–07:26] Margaret’s “hero recipe” for savory bread pudding
• [09:33–09:40] Why labeling leftovers matters
• [12:14–12:47] Coming up: Challenging chefs with tricky ingredients
• [13:19–15:31] Creative uses for tomato paste and other substitutions
• [16:28–16:33] Beyond salads: Cooking wilted lettuce
• [17:36–17:56] Simple storage tricks for longer-lasting produce
• [18:20–18:39] Embracing experimentation and imperfection

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Top 5 Takeaways Recap (19:05–19:21)

1. Think of the end of one meal as the beginning of the next.
2. Labeling is your friend.
3. Substitute similar ingredients for each other.
4. When in doubt, change the texture.
5. Cooking with leftovers should be an adventure.

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Final Thoughts

This episode encourages listeners to shift their attitude—from seeing leftovers as a problem to seeing them as tasty potential. By sharing both concrete tips and inviting a playful spirit into kitchen experiments, Margaret Lee and Tamar Adler make the prospect of “leftover rescue” seem not just manageable, but exciting.

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Transcript

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[Marielle Segarra]

Learn [e-mail] you're listening to Life Kit from NPR. Hey, it's Marielle. When Margaret Lee was a kid, she watched her mom doing something that was a little unusual.

[Margaret Lee]

She used to like to save takeout sauces from every restaurant. So she would have ketchup from one restaurant, barbecue sauce from another restaurant, maybe some kind of soy sauce or duck sauce from a Chinese restaurant.

[Marielle Segarra]

After she collected a bunch of them, she would mix them all together and

[Margaret Lee]

then she would use it to make a a sauce for barbecue chicken, almost always barbecued chicken. And honestly, it was usually really good.

[Marielle Segarra]

Years later, when Margaret and her sister wrote a cookbook called Perfectly Good Food, they dedicated it to their mom and the way she would rescue takeout sauces. Because this was a formative lesson for Margaret, it showed her that you don't always need a recipe to make something delicious. And you can find creative ways to use up just about any ingredient in your kitchen.

[Margaret Lee]

You can, you have these great intentions to cook and eat the things that you're spending your money on. And especially as food costs go up, that's so frustrating. And to use it and make sure that you eat it feels very satisfying.

[Marielle Segarra]

The latest estimate from a nonprofit called Refed is that a quarter of all food products in the US get dumped. And the residential food sector accounts for a big part of that. Which means if you spend $200 a week on groceries and takeout, you might be throwing away the equivalent of $50 of food. But also once you get the hang of how to use more of your food, it makes the daily chore of feeding yourself easier.

[Margaret Lee]

Food waste, in some ways is this trendy new idea, but for many thousands of years, that was just cooking. You just used up what you had.

[Marielle Segarra]

On this episode of Life Kit, reporter Emily Siner is going to talk about how to make creative meals out of leftovers, out of odds and ends. And anything else you usually end up throwing away might shift your perspective.

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[Marielle Segarra]

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[Emily Siner]

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[Marielle Segarra]

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[Emily Siner]

It's a typical Tuesday night in my kitchen. I open the fridge before dinner and ugh, they're the remains of yesterday's takeout. A half eaten rotisserie chicken still on the bone, a couple of raw vegetables, and I usually end up saying something

[Margaret Lee]

like, oh, there's nothing in the fridge. I don't know what to make.

[Emily Siner]

But cookbook author and chef Margaret Lee has a different outlook on my sad Tuesday night fridge. To her, these odds and ends from previous meals aren't the roadblock to dinner. They are dinner.

[Margaret Lee]

Okay, well, the bone will add flavor to a broth or a stew, and all these vegetables will work. So, you know, maybe the potatoes go in first and then the fresh leafy greens go in last, and then these vegetables are left over from another meal, so they're already cooked. So I'll pop them in sometime in the middle.

[Emily Siner]

In other words, think of the end of one meal as the beginning of the next. That's takeaway one.

[Tamar Adler]

I don't think there's almost anything in my kitchen that isn't made out of something else.

[Emily Siner]

Food writer and chef Tamar Adler is the author of the Everlasting Meal, which is basically a love letter to the style of cooking. The day I talked to her, she was putting together a salad for her lunch. She looked in her Fridge found like

[Tamar Adler]

a half eaten burrata arugula salad.

[Emily Siner]

Burrata is a soft cheese and it had kind of melded into the arugula and tomatoes. I might have tossed it right then and there. But Tamar saw potential.

[Tamar Adler]

I kind of picked the arugula off of the burrata and then added lemon juice and olive oil to it and mixed it really hard so it became like a creamy dressing. And it was so good. And I might, I might remake a burrata dressing and it won't be as good because something about it, sitting all night with the little bits and pieces made it better.

[Emily Siner]

These byproducts of yesterday's meal are the foundation for today's. Maybe you have some leftover rice lying around. Tamar says that is the perfect start for tonight's dinner.

[Tamar Adler]

I will fry anything with rice into fried rice. I will, you know, saute some aromatics, so maybe some ginger, garlic, onion, and then whatever other leftover bit there is. So maybe there's like a little bit of beans left.

[Emily Siner]

And just because the meal is built from leftovers doesn't mean she treats it like a second class dish. No, she's trying to give these ingredients new life in their new form and

[Tamar Adler]

sort of just take the approach of making it more flavorful and crispy and then spicy and then usually adding like a squeeze of lemon.

[Emily Siner]

It's all about building up your arsenal of Go to recipes that are flexible enough to use up just about anything. Margaret calls them hero recipes.

[Margaret Lee]

For example, my house eats a lot of bread. My children love bread. I bake bread. We always have bread ends around.

[Emily Siner]

So one of Margaret's hero recipes is an Anything Goes savory bread pudding. You throw all that leftover bread into a freezer bag and when it's full,

[Margaret Lee]

you soak your bread in milk or cream and you add in eggs. And I like to add in all the different cheese bits that I can find from foraging my fridge. And then it can take just about any other meat or vegetable that you can think of. Generally, I just saute them with maybe onions and olive oil and make sure everything's well seasoned. And then you pile it all into a casserole dish and you bake it

[Emily Siner]

for about an hour and then.

[Margaret Lee]

And it is so delicious.

[Emily Siner]

These hero recipes do rely on some advanced planning. You need to make sure you're stocked up on staples. Aromatics like onion and garlic are essential to building flavor. Margaret always has puff pastry in her freezer, which she uses to repurpose leftovers into a savory galette. And she always has shelf stable essentials like rice and pasta in her cupboard.

[Margaret Lee]

Well, I've got chicken thighs, and I've got canned tomatoes, and I've got pasta. So all of a sudden you have this, you know, roast chicken and tomato pasta, and then you've tossed in some fresh greens and some alliums and aromatics, and then you have this really flavorful meal that you just kind of forged from what you have.

[Emily Siner]

Another essential ingredient to have on hand is eggs.

[Tamar Adler]

Like, you could put anything in a frittata, and it'll be great. So just, like, thinking of it as, like, okay, well, if I don't know what to do, I will. Frittatas or.

[Emily Siner]

Tamar says the even easier version of this is just to cook an egg and put it on top. It has the effect of making almost everything feel heartier and fancier. Whatever you make with the staples, you can set yourself up for success by making sure you cook enough to produce leftovers.

[Tamar Adler]

I probably cook for, like, six to eight people every single time I go in the kitchen because I can't fry rice anything if there's nothing to fry rice.

[Emily Siner]

Tamar also recommends thinking about what you're going to do with all the leftovers before you put them away in your fridge. For example, she might chop up the ends of the parsley she used for dinner and put them on some leftover pasta and then put it in the fridge already combined. Now the next meal is halfway started. Or at the very least, she labels the leftovers with their intended use.

[Tamar Adler]

If I had a little bit of leftover blueberries, I wouldn't say leftover blueberries. I would say, like, muffins to be on Tuesday with grated cheese. I would say, like, for pasta this week, or, like, cheese rinds to turn into broth. I really liked doing that, assigning the destiny of the food and labeling it.

[Emily Siner]

This brings us to takeaway two, which is a very practical one. Labeling is your friend.

[Margaret Lee]

I always have some painter's tape and a good Sharpie in my kitchen, so you can label and date things.

[Emily Siner]

It's a method that chefs use in restaurants, Margaret says, but it's equally applicable in your home. And this becomes even more important when you store food in your freezer.

[Margaret Lee]

What is this brown container that I shoved to the back of the freezer six months ago? Like, is it. Is it soup? Is it cider? I have no idea. You always think you'll remember, but often you don't.

[Emily Siner]

Using the freezer is a whole art in itself. Margaret has her freezer bag for the ends of bread, as we talked about. She also has one for making chicken or vegetable stock that houses the carrot peels and the ends of onions and extra garlic cloves and chicken bones. And then there's the freezer bag for smoothies.

[Margaret Lee]

You know, this blueberry is too squishy. Mom, I can't eat this. I just stick into the freezer. This banana is too brown. I can't eat this. I stick into the freezer and then eventually I just put it all in a blender with some yogurt and some juice and I make a smoothie. And then the smoothie is delicious for all ages, even if it's made up of all the things that have been rejected in the past.

[Emily Siner]

Margaret also labels an entire section of her fridge for the odds and ends of ingredients. She calls it the eat me first box.

[Margaret Lee]

For example, you want a lemon for your your cocktail and you cut open a lemon and then you open your fridge and you realize you already had a lemon open. And I will often find like three more lemons in the back of my fridge. And the idea is I feel like

[Emily Siner]

you're looking in my fridge right now.

[Margaret Lee]

I'm staring at your fridge, finding your secrets.

[Emily Siner]

She assures me this is nothing to be ashamed of. But having an eat me first box or even an eat me first zone of your fridge can help. It makes it easy to see the half cut lemons and the open container of coconut milk and the apple that's getting a little wrinkly but still isn't quite ready to retire to the smoothie bag.

[Margaret Lee]

That's an organizational tool that I feel

[Emily Siner]

helps for everybody in Tamar's fridge. Her organizational tool is making sure everything is stored in her own containers. It becomes kind of a psychological trick.

[Tamar Adler]

Last night I served olives at this party and I had gotten them in like a plastic kind of clamshell thing from the olive lady. But I put them in a mason jar before I put them away.

[Emily Siner]

Tonight, she says she'll be more likely to reach for her own jar than a plastic container that screams leftovers. Coming up, I put our chefs to the test with the ingredients that have stumped me in the past.

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[Emily Siner]

I decide to put Tamar Adler and Margaret Lee to the test. I mean, it's not often I get to ask professional chefs for personalized food advice. So I bring a list of ingredients that I have personally thrown out many times because they've stumped me. One thing is tomato paste. So if I have a recipe with tomato paste, I buy it. I use like the 1 tablespoon and then the rest of it just sits there until it goes bad.

[Tamar Adler]

Yeah.

[Emily Siner]

What's like an easy thing to do with tomato paste?

[Tamar Adler]

There are a lot.

[Emily Siner]

And then, to no one's surprise, Tamar starts rattling off a list of options.

[Tamar Adler]

Every time you make a tomato sauce, use some, any kind of a marinade, like a rub on chicken or whatever, olivey dressing or an olive tapenade. Putting a little bit in there. Any minestrone would be very, very happy. Oh, a fresh pot of rice would be great. And it would all just end up like pinky and delicious. I mean, we've probably used it up, right? I think we. Yeah. Alternately, this is what I do more often. I just ignore it. When it says use tomato paste, I'm like, no, I'm just gonna use a tomato. Cause I can buy one tomato.

[Emily Siner]

In other words, you can use tomatoes in just about anything that calls for tomato paste and vice versa. And this is such an important cooking technique that it's takeaway.

[Marielle Segarra]

3.

[Emily Siner]

You can substitute similar ingredients for each

[Tamar Adler]

other, even without knowing a technique going, okay, what is this like that I would know what to do with.

[Emily Siner]

For example, in the case of Tamar's leftover burrata salad, she looked at the cheese and thought, this is a creamy dairy product. It's a similar consistency to a thick yogurt or sour cream. I could make a dressing with sour cream. So why don't I make it with the burrata? Another example, courtesy of Margaret, is coleslaw. It's usually made with carrots and cabbage. Carrots are a root vegetable. Cabbage is A hearty, leafy green.

[Margaret Lee]

Maybe instead you could swap it for collards and daikon radish or something. And that allows you to try something new. If you got something from a CSA box that you haven't used before, or something that's kind of hiding in the back of your crisper drawer and you didn't know what to do with it, then all of a sudden you have these opportunities to swap one thing out for another.

[Emily Siner]

You might end up with a dish that is totally different than what you expected, but equally delicious. One of the many ingredients that tends to hide in the back of my crisper drawer uneaten is lettuce, because as soon as it wilts, I find it unappetizing. And then I'm relieved when it turns brown enough to just throw away. And then I wonder why I bought it in the first place. So I bring this stumper to Margaret. Lettuces that are getting a little suspect. How do I know if it's good to eat? And what do I do with it if it's wilty?

[Margaret Lee]

We've evolved with the senses to help us make this decision. So, like smelling things, the smell test is actually really pretty solid.

[Emily Siner]

This applies to lots of food. If it smells bad, don't eat it. But otherwise, she says, I could pop the lettuce into a bowl of ice water, which plumps it back up. Alternatively, instead of trying to make it as crisp as possible for a fresh salad, I could just expand my idea of how it can be prepared.

[Margaret Lee]

You can sort of change the texture totally. So you could make a lettuce soup. You could make stir fried lettuce.

[Emily Siner]

This is takeaway four. When in doubt, change the texture. This could look like cooking things that you might normally eat raw, like lettuce or cucumbers. It could look like pureeing wrinkly veggies into a soup, or it could look like grinding down the stems of parsley or basil. They still have that same herby taste, but the texture might be off putting. So Tamar turns them into an herb oil.

[Tamar Adler]

I'm going to chop these herbs up or just stick them in the blender with a clove of garlic and blend them up and add olive oil. And then it's going to be my base sauce for everything.

[Emily Siner]

I tried this at home and I can attest a pesto made with the stems tastes exactly the same as a pesto made with the leaves. And it saved me from having to buy twice as many herbs as I need.

[Tamar Adler]

And so I would never throw those things out. They're so good, you know.

[Emily Siner]

One way to increase the lifespan of all the parts of your veggies is to store them with the right balance of moisture. Baby spinach that you buy in a plastic bag tends to get gooey, Margaret says, because the plastic just retains too much moisture.

[Margaret Lee]

So if you stick a paper towel or a kitchen cloth in there with the greens, then they'll stay fresher much longer. So things that you notice getting soggy, you could what, wrap in a dry cloth or things that look really dry, you could wrap in a wet cloth and so kind of managing the right moisture and humidity for things.

[Emily Siner]

Not every experiment with every ingredient is going to be successful. In fact, this is takeaway 5 cooking with leftovers should be an adventure. Like Margaret's mom throwing all the sauces together on a chicken, not trying to achieve the exact same outcome each time. Or Tamar frying rice with whatever she has in her fridge. Going off script is essential to using up leftovers, and that's a good thing.

[Margaret Lee]

It ends up being this fun game where you are creating something from what seems like nothing and solving this puzzle and then you get to eat it. I think the more that you're creative in the kitchen and you take risks and you try new things, the better of a cook you become. And then the more likely you are to get a delicious dish over and over again.

[Emily Siner]

And if it doesn't work, well, that's an adventure in its own right.

[Tamar Adler]

I over salted the pasta water like three nights ago and we just all had to suffer through really salty pasta. And I was like, it's so wonderful to know that we can survive eating this too salty pasta.

[Emily Siner]

Now if it's really inedible, I give you permission to toss it and order takeout tonight. So to recap, Takeaway 1 Think of the end of one meal as the beginning of the next.

[Margaret Lee]

Next.

[Emily Siner]

Takeaway 2 Labeling is your friend. Takeaway 3 Substitute similar ingredients for each other. Takeaway 4 When in doubt, change the texture and Takeaway 5 Cooking with leftovers should be an adventure.

[Margaret Lee]

It's kind of a game, you know, it's like your own version of Chopped, but hopefully you're not having to put gummy bears in your dinner or something.

[Emily Siner]

But you know what? If you want to try it, go for it.

[Marielle Segarra]

That was reporter Emily Signer. Do you love Life Kit? Then you need to hang out with us on the NPR app. It's the best way to catch every episode. And if you turn on notifications, we'll let you know the minute a new conversation drops. Download the NPR app and let's keep talking. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Margaret Serino and edited by Sylvie Douglas. Our digital editor is Malika Greeb and our visuals editor is CJ Ricolan. Meghan Kane is our senior supervising editor and Lauren Gonzalez is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagle and Claire Marie Schneider. Engineering support comes from Sina Lofredo. I'm Mariel Segarra. Thanks for listening.

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