Cleaning out the fridge: Tamar Adler would be proud.

This past Friday and Saturday nights, we hosted very small dinner parties and in each case, the evenings ended with small amounts of leftover food. Most notably, Saturday night found us putting into the fridge small tubs of leftover caprese salad and shrimp scampi on angel hair pasta.

I realized that I could use the salad as a dressing for pasta during the week, but I admit I was somewhat stymied as to what I’d do with the two tablespoons of leftover angel hair and the dozen small shrimp. I figured I’d work something out, though: a dozen shrimp would be enough to gloss a salad or chop up and add to some kind of sour cream chip dip, something snacky, right? It would; but it was the Gourmensch who said, on Sunday morning, as he was getting breakfast ready, that our fridge was filled with things that would be excellent on pizza.

So last night, we made a caprese salad pizza, and a shrimp scampi on angel hair pasta pizza — this second one, we used no mozzarella on the pie, but thin slices of provolone cheese (which we also had just sitting around in the fridge). It was very, very good indeed. “In fact,” I said, as we tucked into it, “it might be worth it to make the shrimp again, but make a little extra, so we have enough to put on pizza the next day.” “I totally agree,” my husband said. What would Tamar Adler think?