Using Up All Those Extras

If you’ve been doing a good job of making shopping for fresh, healthy Paleo food on a regular basis and preparing it, you’re ahead of the game.

As you grow more adventurous and creative in the kitchen, you may find that you’re enjoying following recipes to the letter isn’t as necessary as it used to be, since you know now roughly how much of  each ingredients you and your family enjoys in any given dish.

You’re accustomed to buying in bulk and making extra food to last for a few days and freezing the extras if need be.

But what to do with those foods that aren’t so easily saved, or may not seem worth trying to hang on to in the first place?

Enter the weekly refrigerator surprise.

Not only does creating a dish which literally uses up all the leftover bits encourage your own creativity, it also saves on cost.   

For example, you might open your fridge and see half a fennel bulb, a third of a bunch of cilantro, three carrots, some celery, half an onion and half a papaya, along with a raw, pastured chicken you were planning to truss, then roast.  

Not necessarily items you’d want to freeze, but perhaps you didn’t have a plan for them.   Rather than let them fall by the wayside, why not change the roast chicken plan and throw everything into the Dutch Oven and make a soup?

There are no rules, no recipes here.

Also, it’s really hard to make a mistake on a dish you’re creating as you go!

Since we typically don’t salt food on Paleo, you’re not at risk for over-doing it on the sodium, so aside from burning the whole thing, there’s really not much chance of anything going wrong.

This is also a great approach for when you’re about to go out of town unexpectedly and don’t want to leave the fridge full of food to go bad, nor discard it while it’s still fresh.

Talk about waste not, want not!