Leftover ideas for grains

Here are ten ways that you can use leftover grains, including breads, rice, quinoa and pasta.

Baked french toast

If you’re always throwing away stale bread, French toast is a wonderful way to salvage some of it. In fact, you can even freeze your stale bread and use it to make French toast later on (so long as it doesn’t have any mold). Stale bread may actually hold up better than fresh bread in this overnight French toast recipe and it makes no difference in the finished product.

Fried rice

If you cooked too much rice for dinner last night, you can use the leftovers to make delicious fried rice tonight.
This is one of those cases where leftovers work better than freshly prepared ingredients, because the rice loses a lot of its moisture sitting in the refrigerator overnight. This keeps it from turning into a gooey mess when fried. You can take this recipe a step further and use leftover meat as well.

Pasta salad

It’s easy to transform leftover pasta into a tasty pasta salads. All you need is to add a few fresh vegetables and some creamy or Italian-type dressing. You can find plenty of other great pasta salad recipes and tips here, or you can make up your own. Just mix in some of your favorite dressing, some chopped meat and whatever veggies you have handy. You might even be able to make your salad entirely from leftovers!

Bread pudding

Particularly popular in the south, bread pudding is a sweet treat made from stale bread. You can use any kind of bread in it, from loaf bread to rolls to biscuits. It’s even great for using up what’s left of specialty breads such as zucchini bread or banana nut muffins.

Try a Swiss cherry bread pudding, or a bread and butter pudding for the traditional dessert, but you’re craving something different or a more savory dish like the one shown above, you can find more recipes doing a bread pudding search.

Croutons

Croutons are among the most popular salad toppings, and they can also be used to make stuffing. If you’ve ever wondered why the croutons at your favorite restaurant are so much better than the ones you buy in a box, it’s because they make their own out of stale bread. And you can too! French or Italian bread works best, but you can use pretty much any kind of bread that’s stale enough to cut into fairly firm cubes.

Stuffed peppers

If you have leftover cooked quinoa, this stuffed pepper recipe is a delicious way to use it up. It will also turn out nicely if you substitute cooked rice. If you have raw quinoa sitting around, you can cook it much like you cook rice. Just simmer one part quinoa with two parts water or other liquid until the liquid is completely absorbed, about 15 minutes. These stuffed peppers make a wonderful main dish for a veggie meal.

Veggie burgers

There are many ways to make veggie burgers, but cooked rice is a common ingredient. This recipe combines cooked brown rice with beans, oats, tofu and seasonings to create a flavorful alternative to ground meat.
You could also try substituting cooked quinoa for the rice. Serve the patties just like you would serve hamburgers. Find this veggie burger recipe with rice and beans here: Bean & rice burgers.

Spaghetti pie

How often do you overestimate how much spaghetti you need for a meal? If you have a lot left over, you can use it to make a scrumptious casserole. This spaghetti pie uses cooked spaghetti as a crust and comes out a lot like lasagna without the layers of noodles. You could also use just about any other type of leftover pasta as a base. Serve with salad and garlic bread.