Reducing Food Waste - Garbage Night

There is nothing that pains me more than spending money on groceries, only to end up throwing the food away because it spoils before we can use it. That not only goes for the raw foods, and ingredients, but also for the countless plastic containers that pile up in our refrigerator weekly. So, what do we do with all those leftovers? We have "Garbage Night"!! My 5 year old despises the night that I declare war on leftovers and refuse to cook dinner, she's aptly named this evening of consuming leftover dinners as "Garbage Night".

My husband and I do take some of the leftovers to work with us for our lunches, which does help greatly, but inevitably we still have leftovers that hang out in our fridge.  Implementing Garbage Night has greatly reduced the amount of food that we waste each week.  While my children may not be thrilled by the idea of Garbage Night in general, they do like the buffet style dinner that we have as a result. 

Personally, I'm just thrilled to have an evening where I don't have to worry about what I'm going to make for dinner!  We typically end up having Garbage Night at least once a week; some weeks we don't have enough leftovers to warrant a Garbage Night, and they are all consumed as lunches, while other weeks we end up having more than one Garbage Night.

While my children have a love/hate relationship with the night of leftovers, I'm always excited to use up what we have already made, reduce the food waste, and have an evening where I don't need to think about what to have for dinner.