Food Waste Friday | I almost made it...
Every week, I post a picture of the food that has gone bad over the last seven days. I started doing this in March of 2008 to help motivate myself to use up my food instead of wasting it and it's been very effective. Since it helped me so much, I invited other bloggers to join me in posting their food waste photos, and Food Waste Friday was born.
('scuse the weird lighting...as I mentioned on my Facebook page, it's rainy and dark here today!)
I was super close to having a zero waste week. However, I have a bit of bread waste to report. Panera donates day-old bread to our church, and we sometimes pick some up. I found a half-loaf of sourdough bread from Panera in the freezer this week and thawed it. I think we picked it up not realizing it was sourdough bread, as none of us are big fans. We did manage to eat almost all of it (if you toast it and spread it with jam, it doesn't taste so sour, we found!) but the last few pieces got neglected and moldy when there was some tastier bread to eat (soft and fluffy rolls left over from dinner, to be specific).
That's the extent of my waste, though, so I'm pretty pleased with that.
I'll be back this afternoon with a post linking you to some awesome blog posts I found this past week. 😉
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Have you ever tried sourdough french toast? I think it's the best!
Your compost will enjoy eating this bread, so don't feel too bad 🙂
I don't think I've ever wasted sour dough bread before because we love it! Sourdough toast and sourdough bread bowls with clam chowder MMMMMM!
However we did have other waste this week. I had some waste from before this week that I finally cleaned out of the fridge but this week's waste consisted of a small amount of tomato soup that no on finished and about a cup of salad that wilted before it was eaten. Glad to be back on track as the few weeks before were really wasteful!
Our waste this week was a few stems in a stalk of celery. It had black stuff on the inner stalks that I hadn't seen the day or two before. It didn't feel grainy like dirt so I assumed it was mold. I have pretty bad mold allergies so I decided it was best to let it go.
This week I made my own bread crumbs with the heals of the bread that I made. Maybe you could do that with leftover bread next time!
An entire spaghetti squash I forgot about in storage. There just wasn't much left after I cut away the bad parts.
On the plus side I remembered a recipe that would use up both the too-hard-to-eat orange and the lemon juce in the freezer that I've been trying to get rid of: Robert E. Lee Cake. It's a fancy four layer lemon cake with lemon curd filling and lemon-orange buttercream icing. I also used the long-in-the-tooth fancy mushrooms to make CI's Mushroom Pasta recipe. Both are for the weekend's potluck.
PS: my store has all Gold Medal varieties of flour on sale for $1.25/5 lbs, instead of the usual $2.35. Any other stores have it on sale?
Oh I absolutely LOVE sourdough bread; far more than any other sort of bread. I tried to make it once, but ended up with mould.
This week we had the tiniest piece of banana, apple and pear, but our bokashi bunny made light work of it all, so I hesitate to call it waste after all .. 😉
Sour dough isn't my favorite either. We usually turn it into garlic bread by slathering it with butter and sprinkliong it with garlic powder. We do this even witht the presliced bread right after toasting it.
I found a very old bottle of walnut oil. Ugh, after working so hard not to have waste this week.
Don't waste it...feed it to the birds! Whenever I have old bread and don't feel like creating something with it, I toss it outside and the birds go bonkers for it...fun to watch.
Totally disgusted with the fact I had to dump a whole pound of ground beef. I used half on Monday and just wasn't thinking and stuck the rest in the fridge instead of the freezer. So I went to use it today to make lasagna and of course it was bad. I should have known better. Other than that I composted 2 pieces of bread and a few leaves of lettuce that got frozen in my fridge.
I had a major and unexpected food waste - four year old protein supplements, found in the back of the pantry. (Note that they were not mine, but I felt bad about throwing them out.) Other than that,about a half cup of lettuce that was in rough shape when I bought it, and didn't last the week.
I had an accident at work today and it caused some food waste :(. Otherwise it would have been a no waste week.
I always save bread crusts and misc bread products in a bag in the freezer and then when I have collected enought I make bread pudding. It is very easy and my children love it for dessert. Just a thought.