A devoted and loyal reader in the Chicago area submitted the following comments:
I was thinking the other day that there are some foods that I like better as leftovers than on the first time around. Take spaghetti. I like it enough when it is just cooked, but give me some left over spaghetti and that is even better than recently cooked. Lasagna and turkey too.
This raises a couple of questions for me:
1. If a person made the meal and just put it in the fridge and subsequently served it, would it still maintain all the benefits of leftovers that made me like it in the first place?
2. Does it matter if I was a party to the original meal? So the food was cooked and served and leftover stored and I take my first crack at it as leftovers. Same effect?
3. Are there any beverages that are tastier as “leftovers”?
Thanks to our reader from Chicago for contributing this post!
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Kool-Aid is definitely better as leftover. Day old Kool-Aid is for some reason much tastier.
I am a huge fan of day old mac n’ cheese.
@ Mark,
Day-old Kool-Aid is better! The flavors are richer; the drink is more like real juice and less like flavored sugar-water. Well remembered! I can’t recall the last time that I had Kool-Aid …
@ Bridget,
I will not eat leftover mac n’ cheese. The cheese gets all weird once it cools and you can never quite get the consistency the same when you reheat it.
There are a couple of things that I purposely make the day before I want to eat them – chili and marinara. Always better after a good sit in the fridge!
So where does pizza come in here? I mean, I LOVE pizza, and I also LOVE cold pizza for breakfast, but I feel like they are almost two different foods. Neither one is better than the other, just different dishes, at least if you ask me.
@ Conall,
So cold pizza is a breakfast food and hot pizza is for lunch/dinner? Thinking back to a previous CMD post…
What about foods that are purposely cooked twice? Like twiced baked potatoes? Do those constitute food that has been reheated? Or is that their original form and heating them again makes them three times baked potato?
@ Bridget
Great question! In fact, I don’t know that re-heating is a necessary step for leftovers to be “leftovers”. Also, would you bake the potato a third time to re-heat it? For me it would likely be once-microwaved-twice-baked potatoes. Is that like once bitten, twice shy?