4 ways to get creative with your leftovers (and save money on food)

If you're struggling to use up leftovers like a half-eaten rotisserie chicken, turn the assignment into a creative exercise, says chef Margaret Li. It'll make the cooking process more fun and less guilt-driven. Pulse/Getty Images/Corbis RF Stills hide caption toggle caption Pulse/Getty Images/Corbis RF Stills On a recent weeknight, I opened up my fridge and found an assortment of half-eaten or ignored food. That included takeout that I didn't find appetizing enough to eat for lunch. A rotisserie chicken with most of the meat picked off. A couple of raw vegetables from the farmers market that were starting to wilt. "There's nothing to eat," I told myself. Yet even I knew that was ridiculous. There was plenty of food in my fridge. I just didn't feel inspired to cook with it. So I asked some chefs for guidance. How could I more consistently use leftovers and the other ingredients I tend to overlook? Start with a mindset shift, says Margaret Li , chef and co-author of the cookbook Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking . Think about cooking with leftovers as a creative, experimental exercise, not a guilt-driven one. "It ends up being this fun game where you are creating something from what seems like nothing and solving this puzzle, and then you get to eat it," she says. There are other good reasons to use up your food scraps. Nationally, about a quarter of food products go to waste, according to the nonprofit ReFED . …