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Leftovers are a digestive commitment

When our long-distance company left last week, Better Half and I did what has always been our custom.

We assessed the leftovers situation.

This is when you open the refrigerator and find yourself overwhelmed at the number of Tupperware containers stacked on the shelves, all of them filled to some degree with remnants of main courses and side dishes served to guests.

I don’t have a problem with leftovers. In fact, I owe them a debt of gratitude, because it gets me off the hook from fixing a meal for a day.

Or two or three

“Eat leftovers” is one heck of a menu choice in my arsenal of what to have for dinner. Pick, pick, pick. Graze a little. Be happy.

A lot of people, however, don’t like leftovers. I even fraternize with some of these folks.

They are of the school of digestion that you eat food the first time it’s served, not the second or thereafter. No doggie bags. No leftovers. File 13.

I can appreciate that. Some leftovers aren’t so hot.

Other leftovers, though, taste pretty good on the second day, sometimes even better than they did the first time around.

Meatloaf is like that. Ditto for a chuck roast with carrots and potatoes.

Whether you’re a leftover fan or not, we are from a no-wasting upbringing, so having leftovers is a guilt-trip mandate to eat them.

I don’t turn into a mad scientist and make a mix-it-all-up casserole or anything like that, but I do fix a plate of this and that and pop it in the microwave, lamenting that I always make too much food as a rule. Better to have too much than not enough, right?

Yes, especially if you’re a leftover lover.

It can be a burden though.

The other evening I was dealing with the leftover icing situation, having heeded Better Half’s “suggestion” to leave all the cupcakes plain. That’s how he likes them, so he assumes he’s in the majority.

I’d like to think the opposite, that there are a few icing people in my camp.

I figured I’d be diplomatic and give all our guests a choice.

I put out plain chocolate cupcakes if that was their liking, but I also opened up two tubs of not-really-sicken-sweet icing. One fluffy white. One chocolate marshmallow variety.

And I put a knife and a note next to them — basically permission to have as little or as much as desired. Or none at all.

There was a lot of icing left over much to my surprise. And delight, since I’m not about fake news.

Never in my wildest dessert dreams would I have imagined the day when I would be grossly outnumbered in the I-like-icing department.

What is this world coming to?

One thing is for sure, though, — I won’t waste away on this no-wasting mandate.

It’s a leftover icing commitment.

And how sweet it is.

(Kiaski, a resident of Richmond, is a staff columnist and community editor for the Herald-Star and The Weirton Daily Times. She can be contacted at jkiaski@heraldstaronline.com.)

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