Lettuce & Sour Cream {Food Waste Friday 10/12}

October 11, 2012 By

FoodWasteFriday
One of my biggest pet peeves is throwing away food. I could kick myself every time I dump food down the drain or in the trash: it’s just a complete and total waste! And I hate waste. Which is why I am so thrilled to link up to The Frugal Girl on her weekly feature where she posts a picture of all the food she had to throw away for the week, and invites other bloggers to do the same. The idea is to feel some accountability - who wants to admit they threw away all that money to the whole world? - to help you avoid throwing away food in the future.

Aside from the odds and ends here and there (like the half of an apple that my son didn’t finish and then left in the fridge for several days), I don’t have a great deal of food waste to report:

I do have some cooked quinoa, a little bit of chicken, and the ends of some celery that I need to eat up today before they go completely bad. I’m going to attempt to work the quinoa into oatmeal for breakfast, the chicken for lunch, and I guess I’ll need to chop up the celery and freeze it.

How’d you do with food waste this week?

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I cleaned out the fridge. Yikes. {Food Waste Friday 9/14}

September 13, 2012 By

FoodWasteFriday
One of my biggest pet peeves is throwing away food. I could kick myself every time I dump food down the drain or in the trash: it’s just a complete and total waste! And I hate waste. Which is why I am so thrilled to link up to The Frugal Girl on her weekly feature where she posts a picture of all the food she had to throw away for the week, and invites other bloggers to do the same. The idea is to feel some accountability - who wants to admit they threw away all that money to the whole world? - to help you avoid throwing away food in the future.

  • 1 clementine
  • half a batch of a coconut cookie fail
  • a jar of whey
  • 1/2 cup of leftover homemade syrup (Seriously? Since when does that go bad around here?!)
  • a few tablespoons of “schmaltz” (chicken fat)
  • 1/4 cup leftover homemade bbq sauce
  • 1 tsp butter
  • 1 cracked egg (I was afraid it would be rotten like this one I read about last week, so I turned on my disposal, and dropped that bad boy whole down the drain so I didn’t have to see anything.)
  • leftover zucchini stuff from a church function

OIoioi. Not good, people, not good. At least it was small portions of everything, for the most part. And some of it was “secondary” waste, like the whey and the schmaltz. I have decided that if I save the schmaltz again, it’s going in the freezer because it doesn’t last nearly long enough in the fridge. Lesson learned!

Don’t you just hate wasting food? Here’s a tool I use every day all day in my kitchen that keeps more food from going down the drain unnecessarily.

How’d you do with food waste this week?

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Bean Brownies and Apples {Food Waste Friday 9/6}

September 6, 2012 By

FoodWasteFriday
One of my biggest pet peeves is throwing away food. I could kick myself every time I dump food down the drain or in the trash: it’s just a complete and total waste! And I hate waste. Which is why I am so thrilled to link up to The Frugal Girl on her weekly feature where she posts a picture of all the food she had to throw away for the week, and invites other bloggers to do the same. The idea is to feel some accountability - who wants to admit they threw away all that money to the whole world? - to help you avoid throwing away food in the future.

Once again I am picture-less! It’s just that when I go to throw something away, I don’t always have the camera handy to document the travesty, so I forget. And if I wait until Thursday to throw things away and take the picture all at once, I get frustrated with the useless stuff hanging around my fridge. So instead of a picture today, I have a list:

  • a slice of cantaloupe
  • 2 rotten apples (that I got from the farmers’ market just 2 weeks ago! What is up with that? Hopefully this week’s apples will fare better!)
  • half a pan of a major bean brownie fail (why I keep trying to make bean brownies without eggs is a mystery to me - they always fail!)

Not too bad, I guess. I’m really stumped by the apples. They must have gotten bruised in transit from the farmers’ market to my refrigerator, because otherwise I can’t figure out why freshly picked apples would go bad in less than 2 weeks when stored in the refrigerator!

But. I saved the bacon. And the bacon grease.

How’d you do with food waste this week?

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A Fruit, A Vegetable, and a Hot Dog {Food Waste Friday 8/30}

August 30, 2012 By

FoodWasteFriday
One of my biggest pet peeves is throwing away food. I could kick myself every time I dump food down the drain or in the trash: it’s just a complete and total waste! And I hate waste. Which is why I am so thrilled to link up to The Frugal Girl on her weekly feature where she posts a picture of all the food she had to throw away for the week, and invites other bloggers to do the same. The idea is to feel some accountability - who wants to admit they threw away all that money to the whole world? - to help you avoid throwing away food in the future.

I have a picture, and it’s even on the card on my computer, but now I’ve wasted diligently spent my time wisely on Facebook for the past hour and I have no more time to write this post. So no time to edit the picture, sorry! However, I can tell you what was in it:

  • a nectarine
  • half a cucumber
  • half a hot dog

The hot dog was my Certain Little Someone’s, who is usually a hot dog fiend! For some reason, he wasn’t up for eating the rest of that one, and it just got neglected in the fridge. The other two items were shoved way back into the back of the refrigerator and I forgot about them. That makes me very sad. This week, I’m going to attempt to remember all my produce.

How’d you do with food waste this week?

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Fruit Salad Makes Terrible Leftovers {Food Waste Friday 8/3/12}

August 2, 2012 By

FoodWasteFriday
One of my biggest pet peeves is throwing away food. I could kick myself every time I dump food down the drain or in the trash: it’s just a complete and total waste! And I hate waste. Which is why I am so thrilled to link up to The Frugal Girl on her weekly feature where she posts a picture of all the food she had to throw away for the week, and invites other bloggers to do the same. The idea is to feel some accountability - who wants to admit they threw away all that money to the whole world? - to help you avoid throwing away food in the future.

And…. guess what?! This week, I have no waste to report. Well, actually, there was a partial serving of fruit salad that was looking a little sad - I contemplated throwing it into a smoothie, but then I decided it was just too far gone even for that. This is why I usually try to make only enough fruit salad for one meal! Day-old fruit salad gives me the willies.

And I had a great idea for reducing food waste to share with you today, but then I got to web-surfing and found all sorts of other totally cool food-waste-reducing ideas that I just had to share with you. Be inspired just like I was: Ideas to Reduce Food Waste.

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It’s Peach Season! {Food Waste Friday}

June 28, 2012 By

FoodWasteFriday
One of my biggest pet peeves is throwing away food. I could kick myself every time I dump food down the drain or in the trash: it’s just a complete and total waste! And I hate waste. Which is why I am so thrilled to link up to The Frugal Girl on her weekly feature where she posts a picture of all the food she had to throw away for the week, and invites other bloggers to do the same. The idea is to feel some accountability - who wants to admit they threw away all that money to the whole world? - to help you avoid throwing away food in the future.

So in the picture above, you see what I threw away this week:

  1. about half a cup of homemade rice milk
  2. about 1/4 cup of rice
  3. 1 piece of fish

I learned something this week: I need to make 2 cups of rice milk at a time instead of 4 cups. Four cups generally go bad before I get around to using them, but I’d definitely use up 2 cups within a few days. I use rice milk in all cooking and baking for My Certain Little Someone.

I am not exactly sure why I had only 1/4 cup of cooked rice left over… it came from a container of rice that had actually been frozen, being extras cooked on purpose for that very reason. I should have just thrown that last 1/4 cup into the blender when I made the rice milk. But then again, it would have been wasted anyway, so whatever. Odds and ends are the hardest to use up!

And then there was that lonely piece of fish that nobody wanted to eat 3 days after the fact. Once again, this fishy little food remnant came from a container of leftovers that had intentionally been frozen. We ate up his companions, but alas. One little fishy still remained.

What this picture does not show is the carnage left over from my rampage through the snack cupboard. I am slowly organizing all my kitchen cabinets as I have some spare time (ha!), and this week, I hit on the snack cupboard. Goodness gracious, there were some ancient snacks in there, like half-licked lollipops and such. I tossed them all! But it was all junk to begin with, so I don’t really regret the loss. Too much.

But on a happier note… it’s peach season! I loooovvveee peach season. I look forward to it almost as much as strawberry season. Last week at the farmers’ market, I was able to pick up a peck of seconds peaches for $3.50! Woot! And then this week, they had baskets of “small” peaches for $3 less than the regular price, making them only $5. Sheesh, I don’t care how small my peaches are! Especially if they cost less!

So we are eating a lot of peaches around here. (Not that we mind.) If you find yourself with an overabundance of peaches (and I hope you do!), here are some suggestions for enjoying them:

  • Can them. Canning is absolutely my favorite way to preserve peaches because it keeps their color and texture (mostly) intact. That’s kinda hard to do. Dehydrating and freezing peaches can really turn them brownish blackish, which is just not pretty. And thankfully, canning peaches is super easy, as I explain in my eBook, Your Grocery Budget Toolbox. One of the easiest things to can, in fact! I’ve already canned one quart jar this year, and I hope to can quite a few more.
  • I have frozen peaches before. And they look fine… until you thaw them. Then they turn into a pile of brownish blackish mush. Ick. Apparently a little splash of lemon juice before freezing can help with that, but I haven’t tried it.
  • Ginger Peach Shortcakes are an excellent use for peaches. Even better than strawberry shortcake (and I can’t believe I’m saying that!).
  • Peach Sorbet is the bomb. Nothing beats the smooth and creamy texture. And the flavor. I am trying to figure out how I can squeeze my ice cream maker into the freezer because I seriously want to make this ice cream tomorrow!
  • I always make a couple batches of peach jam during peach season. It’s very much like strawberry jam in the method, although the ingredient amounts might vary slightly.
  • There’s apple crisp, there’s strawberry crisp, and then there’s peach crisp. In a league of its own. Follow this method - 1-2-3- Fruit Crisp! - for any fruit you have on hand.
  • Peach fruit leather is also quite delicious, one of my favorite flavors of fruit leather, in fact. There are lots of tutorials on the web, you can try this one: Weelicious Peach Fruit Leather.

Or, of course, you can just eat each peach one by one, bite by delicious bite. The taste of summer!

How do you like to eat your peaches?

 

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