I guess being poor never leaves you

[cheap traveler]

Well, I wouldn't have made pasta salad in the first place (only DD5 would eat it), but with other things...

Hard to say. For the most part, I will insist we eat it at the meal it was made for, but I might/might not try to re-purpose the ingredients. Meat - YES! It's just too expensive to throw out. I often have leftover bbq chicken drumsticks, and since DD7 doesn't like chicken on the bone, I will often use the leftovers one night for quesidillas, or even in chicken soup after rinsing the sauce off.

Pasta? I don't think I would ever be in a position to reuse it. We really only have it in soup, mac-n-cheese, or tomato sauce. Hard to ruin any of those things.

I also save all of our leftovers, and they become dinner another night, lunch for me at work, snuck into another meal...

My one "wasteful" habit, in the eyes of my parents, is that I WILL NOT save/eat any leftovers after the 4th day. I also throw almost everything out on it's expiration date. I think it is cheaper to replace 4 eggs than to pay the hospital bill from food poisoning.

I grew up fairly poor - 5 kids, 2 working parents. Now, money is tight because I am a single mother. But I agree that being poor never leaves you. I am doing better financially than I have in the past 5 years, but I still can't talk myself into buying myself a new book most of the time.

 

[nairv]

I so agree with you OP. I grew up in a well to do family but was never allowed to waste food unless it was spoiled or I was sick....we were always told to think of the starving children around the world, and that has stuck with me to this day. I cannot bear to waste food, regardless of whether it was cheap or expensive.
Now, as a Mom managing my own kitchen, I understand the difficulties of keeping food from spoiling and making food that everyone will eat. I am now learning to be more smart about meal planning and using the freezer which has helped me a lot.
Just curious OP...what did you end up doing with your pasta salad?

 

[Eastern]

One thing I won't do is mix milk. When I was a kid, my mom would make up powdered skim milk and mix it 50:50 with whole milk. ICK!

My mother did that too. It was terrible!!!!!

 

[Owlpost23]

First of all,I don't care for pasta salad,so I would'nt have made it to begin with.However,if I HAD,and didn't care for the taste,I would have chucked it.This business of rinsing off pasta that has had dressing on it (I gather it had vinegar in it) would have been a bust.Most likely,if the pasta had sat for any length of time,the vinegar would have broken down the pasta,and when you rinsed it off,you would have ended up with mush.Dump it,and make a mental note to taste it next time before adding pricey ingredients.

 

[Marionnette]

spinoff of how to fix pasta salad thread - I posted if I could rinse salad dressing off of pasta and then fix it with marinara sauce. I grew up poor so I didn't want to just throw away the pasta like a poster had suggested that the pasta was only $1. That $1 means alot to me. Take for example, this week I have to wait until Thursday for pay day and I only have $5 left and no boxes of pasta left in the house.

Sometimes you just have to cut your losses and move on. There's no way that I would invest more time and money into a failed entree. My husband made dinner last night - sauteed chicken in jarred sauce with spaghetti. The sauce was so spicy that neither of us could eat it. We threw it out. Didn't even feed it to the dogs.

I grew up "poor" but not impoverished. I don't like wasting money. But then, I would not have attempted to serve a new menu item to my family when money is tight if I knew they were picky and might not eat it.