Are you sure that the mustard jar is really empty?

This is the final installment of my leftover bonanza from last weekend. Over the course of the weekend, I emptied over 20 containers, dishes, and jars. That's a lot of leftovers!

Mustard keeps for a very long time. It has so much vinegar in it, it's very well preserved. I buy yellow mustard in 1 gallon jars. (I bought this jar in 2009). To minimize any contamination, I transfer contents from the big jar to smaller jars, as needed. (We're not serving right out of the gallon jar.)

When it looks like the jar is empty, I pour in about a tablespoon of vinegar. I shake the jar up, then lay on its side in the fridge, turning every couple of days. this softens up any mustard stuck to the sides of the jar. It can then be scraped out at almost the consistency of the original mustard. You'd think the mustard jar could now be pronounced empty. Not just yet. There's usually enough mustard still in there to flavor some more vinegar.

On Saturday, I added about 1/2 cup of vinegar to the jar. I shook and I shook and I shook that jar, until almost everything stuck to the sides and lid had come off in the vinegar. With this mustard-infused vinegar, a half-jelly jar of sweet pickle juice, vegetable oil, and shallots, I made a mustard vinaigrette for a marinated lentil salad.

To go with the marinated lentil salad, I cooked some pasta.

My "secret" pasta sauce ingredient

To top the pasta, I mixed one of those pizza joint, garlic dipping sauce condiments and the leftover pasta sauce from the top shelf of the fridge. My family thought the garlic dipping sauce really punched up my homemade sauce.

Rounding out the meal was a batch of stewed plums, made with frozen plum halves, the set-aside blackberry juice from breakfast, the rinsings from a jar of blackberry jam (the runny jam that served as syrup at breakfast), and the rinsings from a jar of orange marmalade. In one dish, I managed to empty 3 containers from the fridge and 1 from the freezer. Not bad.

Sunday's lunch: or what do you do with two-week old, leftover frosting?

When we decorate cakes, we scrape all the remaining frosting, all colors, into one bowl. It looks a lot like mud at this point, and not the appetizing kind of mud, as in Mississippi Mud Pie, but the greenish kind of mud you'd never think could be appetizing.

This frosting is leftover from a cake my daughter decorated a couple of weeks ago. The last icing tube hadn't even been squeezed out. I did my best to salvage what I could from the tube, and mixed it in with the rest of the frosting. It did look like mud. Now what flavor could go with the color of mud? Chocolate, of course!

I added more milk, powdered sugar, and cocoa powder, and ended up with about 1/2 cup of chocolate frosting.

In the fridge, I also had two "empty" peanut butter jars.

I was able to scrape out about 1/2 tablespoon of peanut butter from these two jars. Add that to peanut butter from a fresh jar, and we had the makings of lunch.

For lunch on Sunday, I made . . . drum roll please . . . peanut butter and chocolate frosting sandwiches -- aka Reese's sandwiches.

They were very yummy, but a tad on the dessert-y side.

At the end of the weekend, this is what the fridge looked like. While not completely cleaned out, it's quite an improvement.

Anyway, I have a family to feed. An empty refrigerator was not my goal. My plan was simply to use up odds and ends before they would spoil. I think sometimes we lose sight of what our aim is. If you have a household to prepare meals for, then spartan-looking fridges work against that purpose, not towards it.

This was a fun challenge for me. I was amazed by how much of our meals I could make from leftovers and near-empty jars. And I think the creativity that went into our meals made them more lively.

This weekend, not so many leftovers to use up. But I am working at the church tea tomorrow. Who knows what leftovers I'll be bringing home from that event?!

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