How to Use Up Leftovers: 8 Recipes That Make Yesterday's Dinner Tonight's Best Meal

Shred or roughly chop the leftover chicken and warm it briefly in a dry pan with cumin, smoked paprika, and a squeeze of lime juice. The spices bring it back to life and give it a different character entirely from however it was cooked originally. Pile it into warm tortillas with sliced avocado, a spoonful of sour cream, and whatever hot sauce you have. The entire process takes about 15 minutes and uses almost nothing from the grocery store — whatever you have for toppings works.

Leftover chicken makes soup faster and better than starting from raw. Sauté whatever vegetables need using — carrots, celery, a wilting leek, some spinach — in a pot with garlic and olive oil, add chicken broth, bring to a simmer, then add the shredded chicken in the last five minutes. The chicken is already cooked so it just needs to warm through. Add noodles or beans if you want something more substantial. This is the recipe for the night before grocery day when the fridge looks sparse — everything that needs using goes in.

This is the recipe leftover rice was invented for. Day-old rice has dried out slightly, which means it fries rather than steams — you get those slightly crispy bits that make restaurant fried rice so satisfying and home fried rice so often disappointing when made with fresh rice. Get your pan extremely hot, add a splash of oil, fry the cold rice until some of it starts to catch and go golden, push it to the side, scramble two eggs in the gap, then toss everything together with soy sauce, sesame oil, and whatever you have — frozen peas, green onions, leftover vegetables. Fifteen minutes, one pan, genuinely excellent.

A frittata is essentially an Italian baked omelette — eggs poured over whatever's in the pan and cooked until set. It's also the most elegant possible use of leftover roasted vegetables. Arrange the vegetables in an oven-safe skillet, pour a mixture of whisked eggs and a splash of cream over the top, add some crumbled feta or grated Parmesan, then cook on the stovetop until the edges set and finish under the broiler for three minutes until the top is golden. It's the kind of thing that looks like you planned it. Serve with a simple green salad and it's a complete meal in under 20 minutes.

The Neapolitan solution to leftover pasta — and one of the great overlooked dishes of Italian home cooking. Toss the cold pasta with whisked eggs, Parmesan, and a handful of whatever cheese needs using, then fry it in an olive-oil-slicked pan until crispy on the bottom, flip (or finish under the broiler), and serve in wedges like a pizza. The outside gets golden and slightly crisp, the inside stays tender. It's deeply satisfying in a way that reheated pasta never is. Works with any pasta shape and any sauce that was on it originally — tomato, cream, even plain aglio e olio.

The best use of leftover ground beef that most people forget exists. Halve bell peppers, mix the leftover beef with cooked rice (or leftover rice — see above), canned tomatoes, cumin, and whatever spices you like, stuff the mixture into the peppers, top with cheese, and bake at 400°F for 20–25 minutes until the peppers are soft and the cheese is golden. The whole thing is assembled in five minutes and the oven does the rest. One of those dinners that tastes like more effort than it is — and uses two leftovers at once if you have rice as well.

The fastest recipe in this article. Flake cold leftover salmon into a bowl, mix with a spoonful of mayonnaise, a squeeze of lemon, a teaspoon of capers, some chopped dill or parsley, salt and pepper. That's it — serve on toast, in lettuce wraps, stuffed into an avocado half, or alongside a simple green salad. Cold salmon has a deeper, more complex flavor than freshly cooked, and the acidity from the lemon and capers cuts through it perfectly. This is the recipe that makes people feel like the leftovers were the point all along.

If you have both leftover salmon and leftover rice — which happens more often than you'd think — this combination is genuinely special. Make fried rice exactly as described in recipe #3 above, then flake the cold salmon through it at the very end, off the heat, so it warms through without drying out. A drizzle of sesame oil and a scattering of green onions finishes it. The salmon adds richness and substance that takes a simple side dish to a complete and elegant dinner. Japanese restaurants charge $18 for a version of this.