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Okay, so I'll answer my own question. I hate throwing stuff out. I've made it my mission to throw out as little as possible. I used to be really bad about buying things like sour cream for a particular meal, and then not needing it again for a while, forgetting about it, and then finding green fuzz on top.

So now, I'm paying a lot more attention to those types of things, and using them before they become science experiments.

A lot of stuff ends up on salads or in salad dressings.

Soups can also use up bits and pieces of stuff.

I've also found that quirky appetizers can use up small amounts of stuff, and the appetizers don't necessarily have to follow the "theme" of the meal, so I can use up the last of the cilantro, even if the main dish is Italian.

I've also found that bread can absorb a lot of stuff. Buttermilk and sour cream can go into bread. Herbs and cheese can go into bread. Sundried tomatoes can go into bread. Mashed potatoes and squash can go into bread.

Just yesterday, I made a breakfasty yeast bread and I tossed in two overripe bananas, mashed. It was an interesting bread. I'll probably do that again some day, on purpose.

Buttermilk becomes ranch dressing.
Sour cream gets used to enrich sauces or if I'm left with that much, I'll make a goulash-type casserole dish.
As far as sun dried tomatoes, they're revered in my kitchen and leftovers are non-existent.

Re: Meat products or anything perishable - if the recipe is not a baking recipe, I'll increase the recipe to accommodate all the meat (or other perishable item) I've purchased. This rule isn't always applicable but I find if a recipe calls for 1 lb. of sausage and I wound up with 1.25 lbs, it doesn't have much of an effect on the recipe and I don't wind up with a quarter pound of sausage waiting on deck to be used for something else.

My cat is very well fed. And it's amazing how many things can be used in salads, and I don't just mean green salads.

Was that the chili recipe from Bon Appetit? My guess is the mole paste will be great in soups or stews, and I can even see it used as a seasoning for something like green beans or potatoes.

I reckon I rarely have leftover ingredients that I don't know what to do with -- if at all. I don't cook from cookbooks, which means that I can adjust my ingredients, plus, if I open a jar of something that I'd only need a half of, my head starts working automatically on ways to use that other half - I absolutely hate half-jars of something stuck in the fridge, even if it's not something highly perishable. But I can't think of too many things like this, although right now I do have some leftover julienned bamboo shoots that I will probably throw in some kind of a stir-fry later this week.

As for meats and sausage - I know more or less how much I cook normally, and when I come home from a supermarket, I spend some time portioning and sealing meat/seafood/sausage in such a way that I have exactly what I would need later. I may even use my scale sometimes - if I bought 3 lbs of ground turkey, I'll divide it into 3 one pound bags, chicken breasts are usually get packed into 3-breast portions (I don't weigh these), etc. As chiff pointed out, if you have 1.25 lbs of something instead of 1 lb of something, it's not going to be a disaster.

@cary, if it's the mole in the jar from Dona Maria or the other one (can't recall the name) make yourself some chicken mole.

I once got a "secret recipe" for mole from a woman my husband worked with, and I was expecting to get the recipe for making the mole sauce itself. Nope, the secret ingredient was Dona Maria mole.

So, you poach the chicken, use the poaching liquid to thin the mole paste to the thickness you're looking for. Add salt and sugar to taste. You can also adjust other seasonings, if you want, but salt and sugar are the only things necessary. Shred the chicken mix that and your mole.

That's it. Done.

And this is one of those dishes that's better the next day, after the chicken and the sauce have gotten to know each other better.

You can also add onions and/or green peppers, or whatever else makes sense to you. Sometimes I do add the onions, but most of the time, it's just the chicken.

I serve this with warm tortillas, beans, and rice.

Or use the chicken as a filling for enchiladas. Or make chicken mole tamales.

Many, many things can be frozen without losing a lot of quality. It may mean you need to adapt what you'll do with it when you defrost it (the texture of fish or something might mean you don't want to just saute it and serve it straight up but want to put it into a chowder, say) but you'll be able to make good use of it.

For herbs, making a pesto or similar sort of thing can work really well and pesto will also freeze well where the herb itself may not. (Throwing basil into the freezer can end up making a shriveled, dried mess that becomes a water-logged nasty mess when you defrost it. Pesto out of the freezer onto hot pasta is great.) Peeled ginger cut into useful sizes will also freeze very well.

Bits of meat or poultry or seafood, especially cooked, will freeze well or can be chopped up or buzzed in a food processor to make dumplings or filled pasta. Those can also then be frozen or used in whatever dish you'd normally use dumplings or filled pasta in (we love tortellini soup in our house).

And then there's Saturday Soup. One of my grandmother's things (and I'm sure many other's grandmother's things, too.) At the end of the week, my grandmother would make soup with pretty much anything and everything left in the fridge. I would sit and watch and be horrified at each addition. She normally started with cans of either condensed tomato soup or condensed cream of something (chicken, mushroom, celery) soup or occasionally canned chicken broth depending on what she had found in the fridge. Leftover beef or pork or certain types of vegetables usually meant a tomato base, leftover chicken or lighter vegetables usually meant something else. She'd add beans, pasta, rice, potatoes...whatever was in the fridge and usually some combination of all of them. Leftover taco filling would go in. Lettuce or other salad making, right in the pot. It would simmer for a couple of hours, usually. She'd season it up. Sometimes she'd add frozen vegetables or a pound of ground beef or some cut up chicken to fill it out. And the thing was, we always ate all of it. It still makes no sense to me at all that it should have been good. And it wasn't ever the best soup I'd eaten. But it was always warm and filling and not something I had to force myself to eat even at 10 years old. And I was fairly picky back then. We've just recently started doing this again...we usually have some homemade stock around, so we use that as our base. It's good stuff, really.

Oh I like that idea for the chipotles, Im planning on opening a can tonight for my cashew chicken, which calls for all of two of them but loses so much depth of flavor without them.

ABSOLUTELY against my religion to throw out food. that said (sigh) it does happen occasionally. We, too, have a well fed cat but he refuses to eat leftovers of any kind... Sour cream, milk, buttermilk all go into one container and end up in sunday morning biscuits or salad dressing or perhaps even a leftover veggie casserole of some kind. We grow alot of veggies and i refuse to throw out any of them; at worst i make a clean the frig stir fry or soup. BTW, i make come-back dressing with some of my leftover chipotles and it is really great!