Food Waste Friday-I'd like to thank my husband for making this possible.
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.
"This" in the title is my unusually empty fridge. And my husband's assistance was purely accidental...shortly after recovering from his previous bug, he came down with another bug, of the tonsil variety (don't ask me how! Normally he hardly ever gets sick. And normally I am the one with throat problems, although that has gotten better since I got rid of my tonsils a few years back).
Anyways.
When you have really bad throat problems, eating is just about the last thing on your to-do list, and so the kids and I had a fair number of dinners by ourselves. When my husband isn't dining with us, my cooking inspiration suddenly tanks, so the kids and I had a lot of meals that consisted of random food from the fridge that needed to be used (for example, a piece of BBQ chicken for Joshua, scrambled egg for Sonia, a piece of pizza for Lisey and Zoe, and green beans for all of us). After a few nights of this, we managed to whittle down our food supply in an impressive way.
I do hope, however, that my husband will not be offering his assistance in this way again any time soon!
Unfortunately, despite our very clean fridge, I have a small bit of food waste to report. We had pancakes one night this week and somehow, I got distracted while the last two were cooking. For some reason they look much more edible in the pictures than they did in real life, so you will just have to trust me. These puppies were burnt.
If I was penniless and destitute, I probably would have managed to eat these, but as it is, I am not desperate enough to eat burnt pancakes.
I decided to take a walk on the wild side and put them into the compost, even though you're not really supposed to compost starchy waste. I've thrown some random small* bits of pasta and bread into my compost before, though, and nothing terrible has happened, so I decided the pancakes could be composted instead of trashed.
My husband is on the mend, happily, and I'm hoping for a no-waste week since I'm starting out with such a clean fridge.
*small, because we hardly ever waste starchy foods. Partly because we're big carb fans here, and partly because starches just don't go bad as fast as produce does.
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How did you do this week? If you blogged about your food waste, link us up by entering your info into the Mister Linky Widget below. Participants get a spot on my Food Waste blogroll for the upcoming week, so join us! You'll save money, reduce your trash output, and get a little publicity for your blog!
We forgot about the last bit of salad and about 6 cherry tomatoes that ended up towards the back of the fridge. Otherwise pretty good this week!
I'm glad your husband is on the mend! I have a hard time cooking dinner when my husband is not eating with us, I don't know why. It just doesn't seem like dinner without him. I temporarily got over this mental block while he was in Iraq, but there were still an unusual number of breakfast for dinner nights while he was deployed. 🙂
Ahhh, hope your husband continues to mend. Some things are ok burned, some things are so tainted they taste vile. That was a pretty good week though and how lovely to begin the week with a clean slate.
We managed no food waste at all. I finally learned and froze half the bread I made to avoid food waste. It seems to go off so quickly compared to shop bought.
What makes you say you're not supposed to compost starchy things?
I had to compost a whole half lb of sliced crimini because I forgot I bought them *last* weekend and not *this* weekend. I'm not counting the 1 lb corn meal and 1 lb whole wheat flour - they had mealie-flies despite good sanitation. (And how did they get them? I don't know, the corn meal has been around for a long time, why did the flies suddenly sprout?)
I was very happy to find locally grown and milled whole wheat flour at the farmer's market, as well as unhomogenized happy milk; both new items. They each cost 3-4x what I pay at the supermarket so they'd better be good. But combine that milk with the happy eggs and I could make some kick-a$$ ice cream! And meringues to use up the leftover whites, of course.
There's nothing wrong with starchy things in the compost per se; they'll make beautiful soil. But all the critters of the neighbourhood, especially rats and mice, will come and love them, too. (So actually, they won't make soil; they'll get eaten first.) Don't ask me how I know this.
The occasional little bit of bread etc. on the compost heap should be fine, but don't do it regularly unless you have a critter-proof bin.
Hmm...well, my compost bins do have plastic lids on them that snap, so maybe it's ok to put cooked/starchy things into them? I don't think any rodents can get the lids off.
William, my whole wheat (I grind it myself) and my unhomogenized milk are all little more expensive too. But, I think I'm buying some better nutrition for us, so I think it's worth it.
Critters like all sorts of edibles. What makes the starchy food different?
One datum: I haven't had a problem with critters and starchy food. Specifically, they haven't gone after starches any more than the rest of the edibles. Since my pile is composed entirely of kitchen scraps and shredded paper, my pile is always being "aeriated" by our little friends.
A'course, the plural of anecdote is not data.
Glad you're husbands feeling better. Hopefully it doesn't get to the point where he needs his tonsils out too!
Really, can't put starchy things in compost? We don't have our own compost but our city takes kitchen waste for community compost. We have a green bucket in the kitchen for the waste, and then it goes into our yard waste can for pickup. They've never said not to compost starchy stuff and I regularly put my sourdough discard in there if I'm not baking at feeding time.
I do know that rodents seem to go after the starchy stuff. At Passover, we put all our well wrapped food in the garage and "sold it" until Passover was over. Our garage mice chewed on the sealed plastic container that held my whole wheat flour--that was they only thing they went after. It didn't look like they actually got into the container, but I threw the whole thing out anyway. A sad waste.
I totally sympathize with not feeling like cooking when one's husband is not home/not eating with you! My inspiration just disappears and we end up having the most random stuff.
You *can* actually compost starchy stuff. In fact, anything that decomposes (kitchen scraps, grass clippings, paper, paper towels, etc can go in your bin. (Just don't put your weeds in there, even if they do decompose! hehe) Some things take a bit longer to decompose, but mixing in grass clippings seem to speed things up significantly, partly because it gets so hot. And if you can throw in a handful of earthworms into your bin, that will speed things up too.