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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Our salvaged lunch (and some other interesting finds in the fridge)

It's surprising how much stuff can accumulate in the fridge in just a couple of days. You would never believe that most of these leftovers "happened" this week. Throughout the weekend, I was amazed that I could still find things that needed eating up. 

(I must admit, there was one science experiment lurking at the back of the fridge. And actually, it really was an experiment from last summer. Some things just don't pan out. I'll reveal it later, and hopefully deter you from trying this out yourself.)

Here's the continuation of my weekend leftover challenge.

Lunch looked like it would be interesting on Saturday. Leftover turkey and dumplings, 4 lonely-looking oven roasted potato wedges, about a cup and a half of cooked pinto beans, corn tortillas, an almost empty ketchup jar, and some pumpkin pie. How do you divide this between 5 people?

I considered making a master casserole, combining the majority of the leftovers, or maybe some soup, blended with the leftover turkey stock sitting on the fridge's top shelf. Hmm. It could work, or. . . I could have a mutiny on my hands. And so I thought, "perhaps today would be a good day to have a this-and-that lunch".

We divvied up the turkey and dumplings. Anyone who wanted any could have some. Easy peasy there.

The 4 potato wedges were quickly spoken for. (Really quickly spoken for!)

Needing to find more for our lunch, I grabbed a few more containers.

This . . .

. . .became this. (Now I realize that it tasted better than it looks here.)

So I took the cooked pinto beans, almost-empty ketchup jar, along with some onion, oil, chili powder, cumin and salsa, and I made a small batch of bean dip.

I know what you're thinking, "Ketchup? In bean dip?" It's tomatoes, onion, vinegar, salt, right? All good. Turns out ketchup works well enough in a bean dip.

Topping the bean dip was sour cream (and yes, that price tag does say 59 cents! The container was squashed, but seal still good -- yippee!), and more salsa.

To go with the bean dip, I made chips with most of the remaining corn tortillas. Most of us had chips and bean dip, topped with sour cream and salsa. Kind of a snacky part of lunch.

I think I'd been snacking, as I was frying with this plate of chips!

I have to tell you, when I make homemade tortilla chips, I have no self-control. I kept frying and frying, yet the plate of chips didn't seem to grow. I was eating all of the chips, as I fried them.

But usually, I allow 2-3 corn tortillas (cut into 6 wedges each), as a serving.

Many of us were feeling full (we'd all just had a waffle breakfast a few hours earlier) just as I was bringing out the remainder of a pumpkin pie. It looked like about 2  1/2 slices were left. So it was divided between my two daughters, who had missed out on pie 2 nights in a row this week. And, um, I managed to put down a tiny sliver of the pie myself, you know, just so there'd be no leftovers, of course. ;-)

Before I move on to the culinary delights of dinner, I spent some time in the afternoon cleaning out more containers for meals later on.

Not very appetizing, are they?

I had some turkey stock, turkey gravy and drippings from my most recent roast turkey (earlier in the week, not last Thanksgiving, I promise!).

But those 3 containers turned into some delicious gravy!

Putting those 3 together, I made a batch of gravy to go over turkey slices for the freezer. I had enough gravy to top 2 meal's worth of turkey.

Any guesses what this could be? It turned into a rather tasty ingredient in Sunday's lunch!

And no, that was not the science experiment. This is:

Last summer, I was reading online about making my own mint oil, using mint leaves from my garden and vegetable oil. The directions said to leave the mint leaves steeping in the oil for a couple of weeks. My leaves became very moldy. It was truly disgusting. You can't believe everything you read online.

So, this is the oil after removing the mint leaves. I composted the leaves, and now need to dispose of the oil.  This is one of those, "it's just too disgusting to deal with" things. And that's my excuse for why it has resided at the back of the fridge since July.

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