Yes, I’m serious.
Sometimes, dinner is a challenge. Some other times, lunch is also a challenge. These are the weeks when you find yourself eating yogurt and granola bars for lunch three days in a row because you failed to plan a vegetable situation. These are also the weeks when you find yourself taking leftover pork out of a takeout container, sticking it in a wrap, and calling it a recipe.
These weeks are this week.
That’s grammatically painful but realistically true.
This isn’t so much a Dinner Challenge meal as it is a Public Service Announcement, a plea to take your leftovers home after going out to eat even if you don’t think you’ll have enough for a meal. People, please. You can always make a meal out of leftovers!
Case in point: the above.
My general rule of thumb when I go out to eat for a substantial meal is to split everything on my plate in half with the plan to eat half then and take half home. It’s good for the waistline and for the budget.
So at Sticky Lips on Sunday I ate half of my sandwich and took the other half home. My mom also donated her leftover sandwich half because they were traveling for a few hours home and nothing says long car ride like eau de pulled pork.
I also ate half of the corn and fries. I didn’t heed my own advice to take them home because I thought they wouldn’t reheat well. Um, duh. They would have made a killer breakfast scramble.
Lesson of the day: always take home your leftovers.
Always.
Back to what I did take home: Monday dinner arrives and I have a takeout box with two half sandwiches inside my fridge. Good news! But rather than reheat both and call it a meal, I opted to switch things up a little bit. Since I don’t routinely consume restaurant-sized meals at home, I made it a little more my style by adding a generous side salad (spinach & arugula, blueberries, dried cherries, walnuts, goat cheese, balsamic) and applesauce…because it’s been sitting in my fridge for months and because who doesn’t love the combination of apple and pork?
The bun on the pulled pork had seen better days so I swapped it out for my favorite wrap and used some of the balsamic vinegar as extra sauce.
I think I might have enjoyed it even more the second time around!
And, by splitting up the leftovers like this, I got TWO meals instead of one! And if I had just taken home the corn and the fries I could have had three or probably four! (The time to let it go has already passed, but really…it frustrates me.)
Rating: 4/5. Lame? Yes. Delicious? Yes! I’ll deduct a point for level of difficulty and call it a darn good meal.
