Using Up Leftovers: Egg White and Wild Rice Scramble

Let’s talk leftovers. We all have them, at least from time to time, and we don’t always want to eat them in their current form. In my house, leftovers are almost always a problem, since I am not good at cooking according to portions and also because Nana told me to stop filling up her freezer. I guess she eats less than she used to!

Either way, I get a lot of questions about how to refashion leftovers, and it’s kind of a hard question to answer because the leftovers vary and so do the people’s tastes. Using leftovers, to me, functions a lot like foraging: you go into the wild (fridge!), see what’s there, grab it, then decide how it fits all together within a meal. Periodically, as I have leftovers I’m refashioning, I’ll do leftover posts like these so we can just get some ideas and methods. I’m always going to label them as “Using Up Leftovers” posts so it’s easier to Google for those. I don’t know about y’all, but I write so much on here I tend to just Google for whatever post I needed to reference so I don’t have to dig through them all.

Sometimes it doesn’t work out, because there’s no way to add enough new things to make all the leftovers work together. That’s okay. You can split them between refashioned meals. You’re basically playing Chopped here at this point, so try to feel okay with it if it doesn’t work out into something delicious. That happens to everyone, where the idea was amazing in our minds but not so much on the plate. It’s okay. You can just eat it really quickly and pretend it never happened after that, and that will feel good to you because you’ll know you didn’t put food in the landfill and you didn’t waste your hard-earned money, even though it didn’t taste as good as you wanted. Over time, dealing with these kinds of mish-mash meals really does get easier. We often get tied to the idea of recipes, or of a thing only being able to be used one day, but it doesn’t have to be.

I think of it like PlayDoh. That’s weird, so hear me out. When you open a can of PlayDoh, it’s kind of omg I can’t wait to get my hands in that! It’s new, soft, pliable, smells right, blah blah. We all know about new can PlayDoh. But then you play with it, and it’s kind of ruined after that first time even though we say to ourselves and our children and say it’s still perfectly good to use. And it is: it’s just not brand-spankin’-new anymore. It’s stiffer, dryer, and basically leftovers. Yet, we all still make new things from it!

Leftovers are like that. You really just have to think of each leftover as its own ingredient, and then consider (or use one of these fantastic sites) how some combination of them will be full of yes.

For this recipe, I had the following leftovers:

wild rice leftover from a dinner

egg whites leftover from curd-making

tomato from a sandwich

half an avocado

I thought it would be weird to have the rice in this scramble, and I honestly was not sure if I’d be able to choke it down. It was good, though, because the starting leftovers were good on their own and because I was able to add a few more new things to spruce it up. Don’t be afraid to use something that isn’t a leftover when refashioning leftovers into new foods. It’s a lot easier, and it usually tastes better. Y’all tell us in the comments some leftover combos you’ve come up with, so we can all share some new ideas!

Here’s what you’ll need

1 tiny onion (maybe 1/2 cup's worth once sliced), sliced into half moons (or whatever. I just like half moons)
4 egg whites (or 4 eggs, if you don't have just whites laying about, or 4 yolks if that’s all you’ve got!)
1/2 cup cooked wild rice (or other rice or other grain completely - this would be lovely with farro or quinoa)
2 tablespoons butter or oil
1/4 cup chopped tomato
1/2 chopped avocado
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 teaspoon za'atar (or whatever spices you like in your eggs)

Here’s what you’ll do

Melt the butter or oil over low heat in a pan. Once the butter is melted, add the onions, plus a pinch of salt and pepper, and let them hang out until they're nice and browned with that amazing smell onions get. Whisk some salt, pepper and the za'atar (or other spices, if using) into your egg whites/eggs and add that, along with the rice, to the pan of onions. Scramble (for me that mostly means stir a bit until it's cooked, but I've seen people take scrambling much more seriously. You do it your way). Add in the tomato and avocado and keep on the heat just until warm. Serves 1-2.