Eating Scraps

I hate to waste food. Hate it. Haaaate it. I save all our leftovers, even things that weren't great the first time around. I can usually re-purpose those into something at least pretty good (eg a weak french onion soup became the base for one of the best pastas I've made lately). Today was an unusual leftover day since some of the food was leftover from my Book Club and the rest was on-its-last-leg refrigerator finds. 

Mission - feed myself lunch using scraps that most people would probably just pitch

For example, my friend, Jessica brought a delish raw veggie pizza and all these bits were left after we had devoured the slices

The rest of my list of hope-to-use-items was as follows:

parsley

tomato

mini sweet red peppers

chopped black olives

spring mix greens

I also have a pretty well stocked pantry that I could call for help to fill in missing items. I thought about just making a salad and calling it a day, but a sandwich sounded really good today.

The seminal thought came from the red peppers; they made me think roasted red pepper hummus. That worked since I always have canned chick peas, olive oil, garlic and lemon juice (I usually have lemons, but keep some bottled stuff for just this kind of emergency) and could add the parsley, checking another thing off the list.

Basic hummus

I decided to broil the red peppers (tossed them in olive oil and dusted them with Jane's Krazy salt) until they just lost their crunch instead of truly roasting them and leave them separate instead of putting them in the hummus. Look how pretty they are!

Here is the start of the sandwich build

So, now to built the ultimate scraps sandwich:

whole wheat bread

sliced roma tomatoes

raw broccoli, cauliflower, carrot, celery mix with a little of the spread that was on the pizza (maybe a mayo, cream cheese and ranch-ish blend?)

hummus

spring greens

black olives

Finished product - sooo good!!

You might think, "Boy, that's a lot of layers, how do you eat that?" Hmm, good question. The answer is - privately. It got pretty ugly:

I should mention that I also fed the kids from the leftovers, Levi had the veggie pizza, some turkey, cheese, pepperoni, and crackers (and a perfectly good apple from the fridge). Paige had a turkey, lettuce, and tomato sandwich (and cherry pie she made yesterday).

(note - I'm lazy and have two babies in the house during the day so the pics are just from my phone)