Most leftovers last four days in the fridge, but do you really remember whether that takeaway is from Friday or from Saturday? And here are the meatballs from yesterday — or wait, are they from the batch you made last week? Get in the habit of dating your food, and you can stop wondering.

Savoury cocktails are having a moment, but the fancy concoctions you see in magazines always seem to involve three custom infusions and a hand-crafted garnish. If that's not quite your style, check your fridge — you might already have what you need for complex, savoury adult beverages.

When I was in school, I didn’t think of restaurant food in terms of single meals. I always tried to order dishes I could stretch into future meals because, like most university students, I was a little poor. The ability of any given dish to be a future meal has a lot of factors.

I love my vintage fridge-to-oven Pyrex dishes. They look great on the table, in the fridge, and in photos, but there’s one small issue with them: I rarely end up eating the leftovers contained within the colourful, stackable glass rectangles.

Let's be honest: People don't order a Caesar salad for the romaine. The crisp lettuce may be a perfect blank canvas for those garlicky, lemony and umami-packed flavours, but Caesar salad fixings, particularly the dressing, can work wonders on all of your favourite salads.

Arepas, those golden brown discs made of corn masa (dough) that usually get stuffed or topped, are the "daily bread" for a lot of Latin Americans (especially if you hail from my home country of Colombia or neighbouring Venezuela). Although not technically a bread, they can be consumed at any time of the day, much like the leavened stuff. They're served up plain alongside a steaming bowl of frijoles (beans), buttered for breakfast and topped with a fried or scrambled egg, or stuffed with all sorts of goodies such as chicken salad or marinated strips of grilled steak. The options are endless.

There is no such thing as "leftover cheese" but, if you are a cheese collector such as myself, you probably find yourself with little nubs and ends of various dairy treasures. You could keep making increasingly tiny cheese plates, or you could make fromage fort.

It is a widely known fact that leftover pizza tastes better after a day or two in the fridge. The same is true of many popular takeaway dishes. But how long is too long? This infographic explains when ten popular takeaway dishes begin to enter the danger zone - along with warning signs to look out for.

I know that none of you ever leave a bottle of wine anything less than completely drained, but sometimes people make mistakes, and a bit of "extra" wine may oxidize. But even if you can't drink it, this now-vinegary, fermented grape juice doesn't need to be tossed.

Whether over-easy, soft-boiled, lightly fried, or poached, runny-yolk eggs are one of the simplest, most delicious things in the world. But with so many ways to cook an egg, we can often fall back on one way to enjoy that yolk: bread.

Leftover pasta, while rare, never seems to have the same flavour and consistency as it did before refrigerating. The sauce has congealed, the noodles are tough, and nuking it in the microwave doesn't help much. But this quick and easy fix will make it taste like new.

I hate to sound melodramatic, but lettuce and I are enemies. It's not that I don't like eating salad -- I do -- it's that I never eat salad fast enough before my lettuce gets "weird", as in "not technically inedible but kind of limp and not-so-fresh looking". This makes me feel like a failure, and I hate failure. Luckily, Jenn Louis has a recipe specifically designed for not-quite-salad-worthy lettuce, and it's called "lettuce jam".

Though I'm fully aware that most of you have never seen or even heard of a "leftover sandwich", I am in the habit of ordering foot-long subs, and this habit often leaves me with an extra 15cm of sandwich. This is not a tragedy, but once the bread gets soggy, I am no longer willing to put it in my mouth. The sandwich contents are still good though, and there are many ways to eat them.

You know that awkward moment in your fridge, when it still has food in it, but it's all 1/2-cup portions of various leftovers and like, one carrot? That moment is annoying, because you still have food that can and should be eaten, just nothing that fits together in a cohesive meal. Luckily, I have a dish for just this moment: Eggs and rice.

Leftover rice sounds like a pretty boring meal, but it doesn't have to be. There are plenty of creative ways to dress it up, and next time you have a batch of it, try turning it into ochazuke.

If you have some leftover rice in danger of going stale, here's a simple and delicious way to use it up. All you need is some milk and sugar.

It's wonderful to find leftover pizza in your kitchen, but reheating in the microwave can make it soggy, while the oven takes forever. Instead try heating your pizza up on the stove top.

You usually have some leftover mash after a big baked dinner. (It's one of those things it can't hurt to make too much of.) This goes doubly for mashed sweet potatoes, which aren't to everyone's taste. Next time, instead of nuking - and ruining - your leftovers in the microwave, try creating this crispy potato pizza instead.

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