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Food Waste Friday (and the ATK winner!)

Congrats to commenter #393, Shannon C, the winner of The Six-Ingredient Solution. Shannon, you’ve been emailed. 🙂

ATK 6 Ingredient Solution

For the rest of you who need this cookbook, you can get it for $14.82 (Kindle version) or $18.66 (print edition)

Also, many libraries carry ATK/CI cookbooks, so you could check to see if yours has this one yet.

If you’re seriously needing help with avoiding takeout, though, $18.66 is well worth it…if the book helps you cook at home for even a few meals, it will have paid for itself.

On to food waste!

Bad News

rotten cucumber and spinach

I had to compost a cucumber I never even started eating and a bag of spinach I never even opened.

Nuts.

We have been eating cucumbers, but I just overbought by a bit. I picked up the spinach with the intent of using it in smoothies, but for some reason, I went for a week without making a smoothie at all. And then the spinach accidentally got left out on the counter overnight, and that kind of put it over the edge.

Good News

I had a pretty good number of tomatoes from my parents’ garden…more than we were going to eat before they started to go bad. So, I blanched and peeled about half of them. I froze some of them in a pint jar (I’ll use them to make this blender salsa) and I made a little batch of sauce with the others.

using up tomatoes

I also had some grape tomatoes that were on their way to becoming dehydrated, all on their own. 😉

wrinkly grape tomatoes

So, I perused a few roasted tomato recipes on the interwebs, and ended up tossing mine with olive oil, salt, pepper, and a few cloves of garlic and roasted them for an hour or so at 225 ° F.

slow roasted grape tomatoes

So delicious.

Because I’d had sort of an absent week, kitchen-wise, I lost track of some bananas, and they got super dark. So of course, I made some banana chocolate chip muffins.

banana chocolate chip muffins

It’s always my goal to use up our bananas before they get to that point (I’d rather eat them at their prime or freeze them for use in smoothies), but sometimes, they get away from me. You can usually gauge the busyness of my week by whether or not I’ve needed to make banana muffins. =P

Lisey has been baking a lot of lemon/blueberry stuff of late (calling for zest but not juice). The result was an abundance of peel-less lemons in my fridge. So, we juiced them all and made a little batch of lemonade.

lemonade from zested lemon

So, it wasn’t alllll bad on the food waste front around here.
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Diane C

Tuesday 3rd of September 2013

I read somewhere that you can freeze whole tomatoes without peeling them. When they defrost, the skins slip right off. I tried it and it worked! I decided to quarter and core the tomatoes before freezing, which makes it even easier. Just thought I'd pass along this handy tip.

Amanda

Monday 2nd of September 2013

That lemonade sounds really good. I just got some lemons for the zest and foresee skinless ones in our house too.

Cecee

Monday 2nd of September 2013

I am not going to go into "true" food waste this week because I recently went through my house and "Paleo-ed" everything. Anything that was open and not on paleo was tossed; anything else was given away or donated.

With that being said. My only waste was 4-5oz of ribeye that got pushed to the back of the fridge on accident and went bad :(. Next week will be better!

Economies of Kale

Friday 30th of August 2013

Too bad about the spinach - I've left it out of the fridge before and had it go bad :(

When I was a kid I used to make my own semi-dried tomatoes in the oven and give jars of them to people for presents. They were pretty tasty :)

I was hoping for no waste this week because I was away for a bit but was foiled by some tahini I left out of the fridge :(

Kathy Wood

Friday 30th of August 2013

Hi,

I was wondering about the portions of ingredients you put in smoothies. I have tried it with spinach, but the spinach flavor was too strong.

Thank you for taking the time for all the details you share with us!

Kathy

Kristen

Friday 30th of August 2013

Well, I usually put in a banana, two cups or so of frozen fruit, maybe two cups of yogurt, and then the spinach amount is terribly random. I've found that adding some OJ concentrate helps to mask the spinach flavor nicely.

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