Leftover Seafood Chowder — Make Do and Mend

I absolutely hate throwing out food.  It’s such a waste.  It hurts me to have to throw out food that has been left too long and gone bad.  I know, it still happens to me sometimes as well, but it always makes me mad.  Even worse to my mind is perfectly good food that is thrown away because someone doesn’t want to deal with putting it away, or thinks there isn’t enough to bother trying to use.

I really try my best to “Use it Up” when it comes to leftovers.

I especially try to stretch my mind and come up with good ways to use leftovers from eating out.  Restaurant food is already far more costly than a meal made at home–so I feel like those leftovers are much more dear than homemade leftovers.  Sure, many times you can just eat the food warmed up for lunch (or in my case with leftover Italian. . .breakfast).  However some items don’t reheat well (yes–french fries, I’m looking at you) and sometimes there just isn’t enough to be used as a meal on it’s own.

That happened to me recently at a local Greek diner.  They had a fantastic seafood platter for just over $11–crab legs, scallops, shrimp, fried fish, french fries. . . it even came with a couple of grilled tomato wedges.  After eating my fill, well actually more than my fill, there was still some left.

Of course I had to take it home.  I guess I could have just had it for lunch, but honestly it wouldn’t have been a very filling one.  Instead, I decided to stretch it out into a filling lunch for all 4 of us by turning it into chowder!

I didn’t use a specific recipe–basically made a strong broth using water and chicken bullion, then added all the fish, tomato and french fries chopped up.  While that simmered I pulled a green onion from the garden and chopped that up to toss in as well.  Salt, cracked black pepper and a bit of garlic powder for seasoning, then I poured a can of evaporated (NOT condensed!!) milk into the soup, let it warm through and served it with some buttered bread.

It was delicious, and none of the food went to waste.

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