Emily Siner

Margaret has her freezer bag for the ends of bread, as we talked about.

She also has one for making chicken or vegetable stock that houses the carrot peels and the ends of onions and extra garlic cloves and chicken bones.

Margaret also labels an entire section of her fridge for the odds and ends of ingredients.

She calls it the eat-me-first box.

She assures me this is nothing to be ashamed of.

But having an eat-me-first box or even an eat-me-first zone of your fridge can help.

It makes it easy to see the half-cut lemons and the open container of coconut milk and the apple that's getting a little wrinkly but still isn't quite ready to retire to the smoothie bag.

That's an organizational tool that I feel helps for everybody.

In Tamar's fridge, her organizational tool is making sure everything is stored in her own containers.

It becomes kind of a psychological trick.

Tonight, she says, she'll be more likely to reach for her own jar than a plastic container that screams leftovers.

Coming up, I put our chefs to the test with the ingredients that have stumped me in the past.

I decide to put Tamara Adler and Margaret Lee to the test.

I mean, it's not often I get to ask professional chefs for personalized food advice.

So I bring a list of ingredients that I have personally thrown out many times because they've stumped me.

One thing is tomato paste.

So if I have a recipe with tomato paste, I buy it.

I use like the one tablespoon and then the rest of it just sits there until it goes bad.

What's like an easy thing to do with tomato paste?

There are a lot.