Leftovers

There are those who look forward to leftovers, who appreciate the thriftiness that they represent, who purposely cook extra food so that they can have it to take to work the next day.

I am not one of these people.

I don't know if I'm recovering from a traumatic event involving leftovers when I was a child, or if it's simply a matter of taste, but in any case, I hate eating leftovers!

In my opinion, there are only a few foods that taste anywhere near edible the next day (or God forbid, 2 days later), and Lord knows, I can't sustain an existence on pizza, beef stroganoff, and Thanksgiving dinner (as much as I'd like to).

While I can usually control the portions that get cooked at home (aside from the fact that I'm married to a man who would eat nothing but leftovers if he could), the hardest is going out to eat.

There is nothing worse than having your server come to your table at the end of the meal, take a look at your plate, an ask if you'd like a box.

"Yes, please", I hear myself say, rather than "Hell no!  Don't you know that this box will simply take up space in my refrigerator for the next 2 weeks before I remember that it's in there, and by the time I get around to digging it out from the corner that it's been banished to, the food in the sacred to-go box will be completely unrecognizable, not to mention have the capability to clear a room in 10 seconds from the smell it emits."

But, I always take my box of leftovers, smiling politely as we exit the restaurant, wanting nothing more than to dump it in the closest trash can, before heading home to a guilt-free evening, completely devoid of conversations involving "do you want to take the leftovers for lunch tomorrow?"

I know that leftovers are the unavoidable result of eating - you cook too much, you're not as hungry as you thought you were, any number of reasons that we find ourselves reaching for the Tupperware at the end of a meal, but really, they're such a pain. 

Apparently I'm missing the part of my brain that tells me to prepare less food, or says "no, don't order that, you'll never finish it", but it seems that I've learned to ignore it!  So, until I master the sacred art of preparing food for 2 (or eating everything on my plate at a restaurant), I'll have to try my best to embrace the dreaded leftovers.