The Waste Saving Cooking Tip Giada De Laurentiis Learned From Her Mom

All home cooks know the feeling. You look into your fridge, searching and hoping for some leftovers that will make an easy meal and all you find are half-eaten portions of the last week's dinners — nothing that's enough to make an entire meal. But stop before you go emptying your Tupperware into the trash because Giada De Laurentiis has revealed an excellent waste-saving cooking tip that she learned from her mom: Take all that leftover grub and turn it into a tasty frittata (via Giadzy).

Making a leftover frittata is one of the easiest ways to use up leftovers and create a brand-new meal out of past ingredients, with little to no effort, and you can use just about anything in your fridge. Leftover pasta? Check. Roasted potatoes or other vegetables? You got it. Bits and pieces from last weekend's charcuterie board? Throw 'em in. Herbs that are looking worse for wear? Use 'em up. According to the Giadzy blog, Giada De Laurentiis' mom, Veronica De Laurentiis, used to make sure all food was used. "My mother taught me to always be resourceful with leftovers — she had a lot of mouths to feed between my siblings and I, so no food went wasted," Giada De Laurentiis once told TODAY.

As long as you have some leftovers and some eggs, you're pretty much set to make the leftover frittata of your dreams. Eat the frittata by itself or round out the meal with a simple salad or a side of fresh bread.

A frittata is, by its very nature, versatile. Like the Italian version of an omelet, anything goes, so long as your frittata is an egg and milk-based dish with mixed-in fillings, cooked either in the oven only or on the stovetop and then in the oven, to ensure all sides of the frittata are equally cooked (via The Spruce Eats). However, a frittata is preferable to omelets for newer home cooks, because there's no fancy flipping involved. Just mix and cook, and you have breakfast for dinner.

If anyone's a testament to the fact that you can make a frittata out of anything, it's Giada De Laurentiis. The celeb chef offers so many different frittata recipes on her food blog, Giadzy, and so many of them contain ingredients that you wouldn't necessarily consider for a frittata. There's a frittata with potato and pancetta, a peach and bacon frittata, a Caprese frittata, and even a sweet potato and kale Spanish frittata.

But the creativity doesn't end with the ingredients you use for your frittata; you can also change up the size and shape. For example, you can make full-size frittatas in a non-stick pan, or make mini frittatas using a muffin tin. Just be sure, the Giadzy blog explains, to use something with a non-stick surface, so that your frittata slides right out of your cooking vessel of choice with ease.