Tenner Week: Day 1: Lovely Leftovers day

Hello! It’s the first proper day of our latest Tenner Week – are you ready to take your own £10 budget challenge? If you need a quick refresher, the Tenner Week rules are here and there’s also a schedule for the week with something new to try every day.

If you didn’t have time to do a quick stocktake yesterday, you might like to do one today to help with monitoring your food stores over the week. It might help to draw up a quick menu for the week as well.

Today’s task is a good food related challenge too – we’re having lots of lovely leftovers.

As you probably already know, Tenner Week is about avoiding waste as well as saving money, and using up your leftovers ticks both of those boxes nicely.

Track down any leftovers you might have that are either in the freezer or are still safe to eat in the fridge (ideally not more than a couple of days old after you’ve cooked them). Also look out for half-eaten contents of jars and cans that are still good to eat.

Now get creative and make yourself Monday’s dinner using these ingredients. Bonus points if you can manage breakfast or lunch out of them too – you will be crowned the leftover king or queen if you come up with the most interesting recipe.

If you’re needing some more inspiration, here are a few ideas:

• Love Food Hate Waste – this campaign website is packed with advice about food safety, leftovers storage and ways to use up your extra food.

• BBC Food, BBC Good Food and Delicious magazine all have attractive recipes especially for using up what you couldn’t quite finish the day before.

• I’m also a fan of the sudden lunch! blog, where chef Suzy Bowler whips up all kinds of deliciousness out of leftovers and storecupboard staples. Suzy’s the author of The Leftovers Handbook, amongst a number of books, and you’re sure to be in safe hands.

• There are also lots of leftovers recipes at the Thrifty Cook site run by Tessa Patterson, and you can follow her RRS feed to be updated whenever a new recipe is posted. Look out for her handy Thrifty Cook series including two Main Meals books too.

• And while they aren’t strictly leftovers recipes, you might also like to pay a visit to PennysRecipes.com (no relation) by Penny Nicholson. Lots of nice low-cost dishes on the site, and if you sign up to the mailing list you also get a free meal planner.

If you have any other favourite leftovers or cheap eats resources, please leave a comment and let us know about them.

What’s happening here?

We have some leftover chicken after Sunday dinner, and some leftover veggie roast, plus some creme fraiche left over from a recipe the day before. We also have four leftover flour tortillas in the freezer that I’m going to defrost.

Yes! Chicken fajita time! Well, veggie roast in one, meat in the other, but you know what I mean. The creme fraiche will be used instead of sour cream, and I have a bottle of really good hot sauce in the fridge door just begging to be used as well. I’ll add some radishes, fresh coriander and plenty of lettuce from the back garden for freshness and crunch, and that’s an easy Monday night dinner where we won’t have to buy any extra ingredients or open anything from the store cupboard.

I’m also trying to have a no-spend day here today, which should be fairly easy as I have loads of work to do.

My other plan is to avoid the telly completely today. I’m doing the TV Diet as well, and know from experience that it’s better to keep those precious 4 hours saved up for when you really need them. We’re planning on having quite a quiet week this week because we’re going to be really busy for the following couple of weeks, so that should work out cheap for the time being (if a little uneventful).

What are you up to today? What are you going to cook up with your leftovers?