Shoulder problems have been ailin’ me again recently, so I’ll have to resort to short Leftovers posts for a bit. This is some Red Pepper Pasta with Sausage made from awhile back. It’s actually based around a Red Pepper and Eggplant/Garlic spread that I picked up at Trader Joe’s once for party snacks. After the party, I found out that the leftover could be used to make some pretty good leftovers.

I think spreads like this or jars of pasta sauce can be a great Cheap Eats weapon to have on hand, especially for single eaters. You can store the jars for quite awhile unopened, but even when you do start using from the jar, it’ll keep for a long time in the fridge. That allows you to make several meals out of just one jar of spread or sauce. In this case, I cooked up some Italian Sausage taken out of their casings and then added some red pepper spread along w/ chicken stock, onion, parsley and some noodles. Since the spread is usually a bit strong, a little goes a long way.

Usually, when I get a hankering for a sandwich at lunchtime, out comes the lunchmeat and I pop open a can of soup. However, this time I had some leftover grilled chicken thighs from dinner along with some smashed roasted garlic potatoes in the fridge so this formed the basis of my leftover feast.

Chop up some celery and green onion fine, shred or chop up the grilled chicken, add some mayo, salt, paprika and pepper and you’ve got yourself a nice sandwich already. I didn’t put in tomato or lettuce this time, but that always makes it taste more fresh.

The mashed potatoes are cooked red potatoes mixed with chopped roasted garlic, a bit of butter, pepper and a scoop of sour cream. Roasting up garlic is a great way to get a lot of good garlic flavor into things without any of the overly pungent raw taste. Just take some unpeeled garlic cloves and roast them directly in a skillet for about 7 minutes, tossing frequently. Squeeze them out of the skins, chop/smash them, and you’re done. (You can also roast them in the oven if you want.) I usually use the roasted garlic when making garlic bread.

Hello Cheap Eaters. I haven’t had much time to post because I’ve actually been painting the house. But anyhow, here’s a pic of some leftovers I saved from awhile back. This is Kimchi Fried Rice… yep. That’s fried rice with kimchi (also: kimchee or gimchi, feel free to read up if you haven’t had it before) thrown into it.

It’s quite nice and spicy, and flavorful as well. I usually have to add a bunch of flavoring from soy sauce, fish sauce and salt when making fried rice, but kimchi has all the flavor built in. The fried rice pictured also has chicken, mushrooms and eggs in it. You can control the amount of spiciness (and tanginess) of the fried rice by the amount of kimchi and the liquid you also add in. One thing, I like my fried rice sort of wet… almost like a pilaf. If you don’t, you may want to add less of the liquid and maybe enhance it with some other chili peppers to up the heat.

Happy Friday! Here’s a leftover lunch, well, it’s actually a leftover breakfast that I had a few weeks ago. We had stopped by the regional fish taco chain Wahoo’s (CA, HI, CO and TX only) the other day for lunch. If you’ve ever gotten a combo plate at Wahoo’s you know that they give you a TON of their special “Ahi Rice” which is not bad. They also give you a choice of spicy white beans or black beans as well.

So we always have leftovers for the next day but it’s usually just the rice and beans. This time I decided to eat it for breakfast. Mixed the rice and beans together and fried it up like fried rice… added some spare tomatoes and mushrooms in as well. Not half bad!

Oh, and yep that’s two fried eggs. Avacados are free courtesy of my parent’s ever-abundant backyard tree.

I was planning on posting like 5 pictures of leftovers this week but just didn’t get around to it. In any case, here’s your Leftover Lunch for today: Meatloaf! We like to make a ground beef / pork meatloaf based on a recipe from Cooks Illustrated. I know a lot of people use the meatloaf trinity (veal, beef, pork) but we usually don’t have veal on hand. I’ve heard you can also involve ground turkey or chicken. The recipe we use actually has a semi-sweet hot glaze on the top, and though I’m not usually a fan of sweet main dishes it goes quite well with the meatloaf because it’s a thin glaze.

The meatloaf also includes bread crumbs, egg, onions, parsley and yogurt as well as various spices. We bake the meatloaf on a cookie sheet, instead of in a loaf pan. One tip: if you don’t like semi-crunchy onions in your loaf, you can pre-cook them in a skillet. Just keep cooking the onions with a bit of oil and keep adding water until the onions are soft. Then drain, cool and add it to the meatloaf mixture.

I’m starting up a new feature here at Cheap Eats that’s called Leftovers for Lunch. Thematically, it fits with the whole eating cheap mantra - those leftovers are gold for next day lunches. Many people would otherwise throw away perfectly good free food from a previous meal. Serious cheap eaters have been known to stretch 3-4 leftover meals out of a larger dinner.

But the real reason for this section is that we take a ton of photos of our meals, but we don’t always have time to write full posts about them. Rather than let these photos go to waste, I decided to make them into Leftovers for Lunch. It’ll usually just be the photo plus a few words about what it is. Feel free to comment, or wait for “real” posts.

This one features food from our July 4 extravaganza: we had Bratwurst in Beer (first time I’ve ever cooked it) for lunch and then Grilled Flank Steak, Grilled Corn, and Potato-Egg Salad with Cucumbers and Carrots. Then, I combined these for leftover lunch the next day. Whew, a lot of food!