There are two servings of paella in the fridge. There's one or two of beef stew. And I'm making chicken pot pie — serves 6, I reckon — for dinner tonight. So tomorrow night: leftovers.

I've done fairly well in reducing the amount of food I cook each evening now that it's just Kin and me for dinner. There are often leftovers, but typically we'll eat them the next day for lunch. But every once in a while, he'll get too caught up in meetings and will miss lunch. (Me, I never miss a meal.) Or I'll make something that the recipe says serves 6 and actually serves 10. That paella, for instance.

When we do have an overabundance of food, I'd like to be able to take a meal out to Ashley, the homeless woman who frequents the park across the street from our apartment building. I even bought some paper plates and plastic forks so that I could do so. Inevitably, she seems to disappear the days that I have something to share. (She did get some birthday cake - I think that's the last time I've been able to feed her.)

I hate throwing out food. Doing so is one of my "triggers" when it comes to food, I suppose, as I was often chastised as a child for not eating everything that was on my plate. I know the stereotypical admonishment is something about "starving children in Africa." But I remember being told by my aunt that it was more a matter of my being a wasteful American than any condition of a faraway child. She wasn't wrong, of course. She would invoke wartime Britain — one that I think she was born after, to be honest — in which there was food rationing. And I would (silently) invoke my preference to not eat the fatty bits of a lamb chop. That didn't make me indulgent, for crying out loud. But I always feel like that shirking, embarrassed little girl when I misjudge how much food should be on my plate or in a meal.

Eating leftovers also reminds me of how my mother structured our weekly meals: she'd cook a roast on Sundays, then we'd proceed to have variations on that meat throughout the week. The final night was almost always a curry, which my dad said was because curry powder was used to disguise rotten meat. Racist and wrong. And I've always loved Indian food, even though I tend to not like leftovers. Or rather, I never really liked meat that much, particularly night after night after night.

That's the problem with leftovers: the repetition of a food I struggled to eat the night before. That's not how I cook or eat today, but the reluctance remains.