"A spoonful or two of boiled custard can be utilized as sauce for another pudding. Tapioca pudding can have canned fruit with plenty of juice put with it; it can be cooked over again and this time served cold, perhaps in a mould. In fact nearly everything but a small bit of pie can be made over to seem unlike itself. Pie, my dear, I really think you must eat for lunch, provided there is but one small piece."
"Fred can have it for dinner," said Dolly, complacently. "All men love pie, and I can have coffee only, for once."
"So you can; or, if you have saved all the bits of pie-crust, as, of course, you should have done, you can have a little tartlet in place of the pie. I always make up some tartlets, anyway, when I make crust, and when they are filled with peach jam with perhaps a dot of cream on top, they make an excellent dessert. This reminds me to say that a half-can of fruit or left-over cranberry sauce can be put into a pie-crust shell with strips of crust over the top; they make very good pies."
"I should think you could use left-overs of canned fruit for pudding sauces."
"Bright girl! So you can. Chop up the fruit and heat the whole together; it would be especially good on cottage pudding."
"I hate cottage pudding; I shall never have it."
"Oh, yes, you will; put grated chocolate in it and you won't know what it is. But don't divert my attention, for I am not done yet with left-overs. There is orange peel, for one thing. Keep all the orange skins you have and throw them into a crock of salt and water and let them stand till you have enough to make candying worth while. Then drain them and wash them well, and put them in cold water and bring to a boil; repeat this till the water is perfectly fresh. When the skins are transparent take them out, put two or three together and cut them in tiny little strips; cook these in thick sugar and water syrup, only enough to cover them, and dry in the oven with the door open. Sprinkle with granulated sugar, put them in a fruit-can with a cover, and they will keep for years, and be just the thing to put in fruit-cake or plain bread pudding or any such thing. Lemon peel and grapefruit peel are good, too, and quite as useful.
"When you have a little syrup left after you have taken out spiced peaches or pears from a can, stew peeled and quartered apples gently in it and serve them without canning. They will be almost as good as the peaches were; and sometimes stew prunes a little, till you can slip the stone out, and put these in the syrup. You can't guess how good they are, and how they help out a plain meal."
"And watermelon rind—don't you do something with that?"
"Yes, make that up into sweet pickles, too."