A little late, but here's my food waste news!
I composted a rotten potato (does anything in the universe smell worse? I think not.) and a bad avocado (cue sad trombone).
And there was also this:
A lone piece of old pizza (I think my kids just didn't see this, because normally they are champions at eating leftover pizza!), and some leftover green beans.
I am not normally a champion at eating leftover green beans, and so usually I just eat any extra beans the night of.
But apparently I didn't this time and I have no idea why!
In more cheerful news....
I frozen random, less-than-fabulous fruit for smoothies.
Seriously, what WOULD I do without smoothies???
(I would throw out a lot more food, that's what.)
I toasted two leftover hot dog buns...
and ran them through the food processor to make bread crumbs.
Which I will most likely use to make zucchini patties.
Here's my current fridge.
The three bowls up there on the right? Taco salad in the making, I decided.
(the last of the lettuce, leftover taco meat, plus dip from chipotle chicken kabobs that I made earlier in the week)
I just finished eating that while typing up this post.
It was delicious.
Aaaaand here's my freezer, which is still mostly just full of smoothie ingredients.
That's how I like it.
So!
That's the official update from my house.
I know it's Saturday, but hey, if any of you feel like chatting about food waste, talk to me in the comments and let me know how things are in your neck of the woods!
I always think of you when I buy avocados from Aldi now 🙂
A taco salad with that dip sounds very good right now. I'm hungry! I'm making hamburgers for 4 of us tonight so I might keep the 4th portion of ground beef so I can make myself a taco salad for lunch tomorrow as we have tortilla chips that need to be eaten.
I posted my Food Waste Friday post yesterday morning. http://imperfectlyfrugally.blogspot.com/2015/07/food-waste-friday.html
Since then I did make Marinated Watermelon Salad with part of the lackluster watermelon. Not horrible but not great yet very refreshing so I'm eating it anyway. We had Leftovers Night last night and succeeded in eating all of the leftovers, yay!
I'm now contemplating making Strawberry Summer Cake and Triple Berry Scones to use up some of the strawberries that I oversoaked before they go bad.... OK, here I go!
Well, now I want to come eat at YOUR house! Bring on the strawberry cake. 😉
I just stumbled upon your blog this morning and enjoyed your food Waste Friday...you inspired me to inventory my upstairs freezer this morning prior to grocery shopping. I threw away a few frozen cubes of zucchini and sweet potato purée from last fall when my son was still eating soft foods. I also tossed two lost-and-found homemade fruit leathers that were a bit too leathery:) I look forward to reading more!
Welcome, welcome! So glad you're going to stick around.
Good for you! We tossed some fish of unknown vintage (see below) and a few things that were lurking in the back of the cabinets. I cut back my massive rosemary plant last week; it never goes to waste because I just bring the cuttings, and brown paper bags, into the office for everyone to take. Ditto the basil and scallions when they're overgrown.
I've started googling two random ingredients from my kitchen to see what comes up recipe-wise. Thus we have sundried tomato pork tenderloin in the oven right now. It smells divine and I never would've thought of it to use the last of the jar of sundried tomatoes.
DH likes to order from Blue Apron and try new recipes. I'm going to ask him to stop ordering the fish options. The fish comes in unlablled, undated, and more often than not gets tossed uncooked and smelling a little funky. I KNOW.
I'll be out of town for business most of the week, so I'm getting in as many home-cooked meals as I can before I leave. It's so much more Weight Watchers-friendly (yay for being down 12 pounds)!
Congrats!!
We were à way last weekend, so we did 't get very far through our farm share before I had to pick up the one for next week. I'm happy to say that the only thing I threw out was a bunch of mustard greens. I shredded and froze two medium zucchine and made sweet preserves with some patty pan squash. I also froze a bunch of kale. I still have kohlrabi and beets from last week, but they last awhile and we'll eat them in the next few days.
Ooh, those deliveries are tough when you're going out of town. Good job saving most of it!
How can you have uneaten pizza?!? Would never happen to me. Tofu perhaps, not pizza, hihi.
Can't recall if we had any food waste this past week...hmm... but we did today. We had 15 people over for a BBQ and we ended up with too many toasted burgers bun (4?). They ended up in the compost bin since I can't use them as bread crumbs (my husband is gluten intolerant). We also have leftovers patties and sausages, plus a lot of untoasted buns, which we (kids and I) will eat. So, yeah, I think this is it.
There must be a pizza bug going around because I threw some away too! We have never thrown out pizza yet. I think that it just was forgotten with the other dinners going on. I figured out that cooking three meals and then a leftover day is the best thing for our two person home. We just do that in rotation. We take leftovers for lunches and have the leftover day so very little goes to waste now. I also composted four strawberries that accidentally got pushed to the back.
I went through the freezer today and found 6!!!!! Containers of 3-6 servings of chili. Next week in going to thaw all of it and re cook it together into a huge pot. I couldn't believe six containers! I also thawed three single serving containers of different soups. I thawed all three and combined them. For dinner we had chicken noodle/black eye pea/cabbage soup. My hubby said it was "delicious". It really was. Food save for the win!!
Fifty pound bags of potatoes go on sale for 7$ about twice a year in my grocery store and the last bag I got had a rotten one in the bottom of the bag!!! Took me awhile to figure out where the smell in our basement was coming from and then I had to take every one out to find the culprit!!
Isn't that the WORST? I almost can hardly believe how bad one of those smells.
Food waste this week was MONUMENTAL! Thanks to a 10 year old boy who did not take the extra 3 seconds to confirm the deep freeze was shut after he grabbed a package of Klondike Bars.. we lost :
4 bags of precooked, portioned and frozen ground beef.. each bag had about 24 ounces in it....
1.5 bags of red/white/blue popcicles.. I had JUST bought them from Aldi earlier in the week..
1 unopened box of Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches,
about a half dozen random popcicles
I was heading out the door to a committment when I discovered the travesty! Thankfully husband was not traveling this week and was able to manage the situation while still handeling work calls.
He fired up the grill and managed to salvage 3 bags of chicken breast that I had portioned and trimmed previously for easier usage( each of those bags was approx 20 ounces of chicken). Then he tossed an old cookie sheet on the hot grill and cooked the lbs of defrosted bacon up outside= NO INSIDE bacon stink! The single frozen dinner, that the guilty child begged me to get earlier in the week, was cooked and became his lunch when we arrived home from our event.
Thankfully 2 packages of chicken were still tucked deep in the back and still hard- he tossed those into the upstairs freezer, along with the berries, peppers and pesto cubes that were all in various stages of defrost.. Since they are destined for smoothies or baked dishes no worries there. The defrosting shredded cheese got tossed into the fridge so it has been used liberally this week on all meals CHICKEN- sandwiches, wraps, salads.. you name it that is ALL we have eaten since Wednesday! Juice concentrates were just refrozen, as were the popcicles in plastic tubing. My jars of homemade strawberry jam were tossed into the fridge.. husband loves it so he skipped what we already had in fridge and started on a jar.. I gifted one to a friend when we went swimming the next day.
My deep freeze smelled like cotton candy from all the melting popcicles.. so after it was totally defrosted I scrubbed it and put a box of bakign soda in it after I turned it back on...
The positive that I have to find.. I have not gone shopping yet, wanting to empty the fridge upstairs first.. SO I used the wmpty space to freeze a few dozen tupperware containers of water to make blocks of ice for our chickens.. the heat is finally here and they are panting!
Ohhh, that is so so so frustrating when that kind of thing happens! But yay that you were able to salvage at least some of the food.
With all this food waste you should get some chickens Kristen. Well maybe you could support about half of one chicken - on a starvation diet!
Good job.
David.
Half a head of iceberg lettuce; I couldn't remember what I intended to do with the second half.
Did you know Cook's has a recipe for iceberg lettuce soup? It sounds very intriguing to me, but I haven't tried it yet.
I love the Friday food waste posts! I have tried to make it my personal mission to not waste ~Anything~! I have yet to succeed 100%, but I'm working on it.
This week, for me, was a good week. Only one piece of blonde that crusted over and made me nauseated to eat was tossed and about 1/4 of an onion turned mushy on me. That's it. I have gotten in the routine of cooking twice a week and eating "leftovers" for the week... It's just me here, so not a problem.
My freezer is full but my fridge is 3/4 empty, as I like it. No need to shop for awhile!
Save on, my friends!
Well in my neck of the woods I've been videoing my waste! 🙂
Rotten Potato = the smell of rotten fish IMO
And agree - what we do without smoothies? The magic wand of food waste saves!
I had a rotten potato a few weeks ago - it was awful! Blech!
What all do you put in your smoothies? I really need to do more to rescue borderline fruit and I have at least one person in the house who I know would love smoothies.
Well, they vary a LOT, but they pretty much always include yogurt and a banana. And then from there, who knows! All manner of frozen fruits, sometimes greens like spinach or kale, and if there are greens, I usually include some frozen OJ concentrate. That helps a lot with making kale more tolerable.
Oh, and I sometimes add raw beets. But that's purely for their nutritional punch and not at ALL for their flavor.
Which is, um, earthy.
(earthy = tastes like dirt)
No rotten potatoes here, but some cabbage that I shredded up plus about 1/8th of the rest of the head that I can't seem to get through. If I am motivated tonight I will stir-fry it all and serve with some rice or pasta... Not kicking myself though; I find it difficult to eat an entire head of cabbage on my own, and I like cabbage!
The other one that's hard to get through as a singlet is a watermelon. It was lackluster (whomp whomp!), and I used my freezer space for much tastier fruits: blackberries and blueberries I picked off the vine, and cherries. I'm not really a smoothie person, though. I'll bake these up into muffins or pies.
The carrots are my question mark. I bought a 10# bag or something ridiculous, forgetting I already had a 4# bag in my fridge. In three more weeks my husband moves in, and boy can he eat! So I'm hoping this will solve some of my food waste problems with tasty summer produce. 🙂
I did save some ham by making calzones.
Do you have any horses nearby? 😉 We have some in our neighborhood and we feed carrots to them!
Oh, and did you try the roasted carrots recipe I posted? It's a little hot for roasting veggies right now, but they ARE super tasty. https://www.thefrugalgirl.com/2012/12/easy-ridiculously-good-roasted-carrots/
I did save the cabbage - yay! I made an assorted pasta with the cabbage shreds, leftover plain veggies, about 1/3 cup of provolone cheese shredded, and the odds-and-ends pasta bin (gemelli, ziti, and elbows).
I make those roasted carrots ALL the time when it's not 100 degrees outside. If they can last until next weekend, I'll shred them into a sandwich spread with ham, cream cheese, and raisins, and into some coleslaw with a (new) head of cabbage. I'll be feeding a crowd next weekend - the troops are rallied to help us move.
Oh, and that reminds me that carrot raisin salad is a pretty good way to use up carrots too.
Yay on the cabbage!
I threw away a potato too this weekend that we had somehow forgotten about in a PLASTIC bag! Yuck-o.
Just a question--at what point in the grocery cycle do you do your fridge clean out? Ours is nearly empty at the end of the week and it makes finding and eating up leftovers for Friday lunch so much easier.
I usually clean it out near the end of my grocery shopping cycle...that way it's organized and ready for new groceries, and I have a good handle on what I have and what I need to buy.
Kristen, you are right about the rotten potato smell! Last week I kept smelling something in the kitchen that was awful....took out the trash...still smelled like something had died. Finally upon further investigation found 2 small potatos that had scooted up under something in the pantry and had gone bad. Ohhhh...had to disinfect and clean and finally got rid of the smell.
Isn't it dreadful? It truly smells like something has died!
We were on vacation last week and eating most of our meals in a cottage. We had brought/bought groceries for the week. I did well to use most of what we had. However, on the last day I could not fit the dead bananas in the cooler or my bread ends. I felt bad that I wasted those. I always reuse them.
I used my last stash of bread ends to make your suggested french toast casserole. It was great. Thanks!
Vacation is super hard on the food waste front. I almost always end up throwing away some food because I don't have room in my cooler to bring it back.
The toasting of leftover buns to make bread crumbs is genius... I'm totally going to use that one! I'm guessing you would just freeze them then if you don't have a bread-crumb-using meal on the menu for that week?
I just freeze the crumbs, actually! Then they're ready for use whenever I need 'em.