How to Avoid Food Waste Near-Misses
Some of the most thrilling moments in my fight against food waste have come in the form of creative rescues.
Turning squishy produce into a smoothie, dry takeout rice into pudding, or pureeing leftover veggies with leftover gravy to make soup...those are triumphant moments indeed.
But honestly, the best (and less flashy) way of avoiding food waste doesn't involve swooping in at the last moment with a dramatic save.
Nope...I think it's far preferable to avoid those close calls altogether.
Of course, no one does this perfectly, so it's good to have plenty of swoop-in-and-save-it tricks up your sleeve.
But it's more important to do some preventive work.
1. Buy produce mindfully
If you accidentally buy too much pasta, salad dressing or jarred tomato sauce, it's no big deal because those types of foods can usually last until you eat them.
But produce has a limited shelf life, and if you just buy it willy-nilly, you'll probably end up with more than you can use.
I don't at all recommend that you reduce your consumption of fruits and veggies (quite the opposite!), but I do think it's good to be realistic about how much you can actually eat before it goes bad.
After all, produce isn't nutritious if you don't eat it.
To this end, I find a menu plan to be super helpful.
I don't generally plan breakfasts and lunches, but having main and side dishes planned out for dinners makes it far easier to buy exactly what we need (and the unplanned breakfast and lunches give us opportunity to eat leftovers and extras.)
A related note about produce: After a shopping trip, make a point of using your most perishable produce first. Save the oranges, cabbages, and carrots for later; eat the spinach and strawberries right away.
2. Store food properly.
Take the time to give your berries a vinegar rinse.
Store your potatoes in a cool, dark place.
Plunk your cilantro into a mug of water.
Put your mushrooms in a paper bag.
Properly protecting and storing your food like this buys you time, and that will help reduce the number of times you need to rescue almost-bad food.
(This LifeHacker article has some helpful tips and there are lots of other articles on the web to help you learn more about food storage.)
3. Know what's in your fridge.
I don't throw out tons of food these days, but when I do, it's generally because I've forgotten about it until it's too late.
Knowing what you have is key, so keep your fridge organized and give it a look-through every other day at least.
That way, it's highly unlikely that you'll forget about something until it's turned into a food-waste emergency.
4. Don't cook lots of bad leftovers.
Some foods work out really great as leftovers.
Some are even better leftover (Soup comes to mind.)
But there are some other foods that are downright dreadful the next day.
(Cough, cough, fish, cough.)
So I try to err on the side of caution when I'm making something that will be hard to eat later. This means I have no qualms about making a huge pot of soup, but I try to be really precise when I'm cooking fish.
(Unless it's fish cakes, in which case I make as many as I want because I adore them leftover, hot or cold!)
I can't be completely accurate at predicting my family's appetites, so when I make a limited quantity of fish, I try to round out the meal with a more generous dish of something that's good the next day (scalloped potatoes and a salad, for example.)
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A subset of #4 is think about how you could use or preserve leftovers if you have them: Cooked chicken is about a versatile as you can get, but leftover poached eggs are a challenge. Reheated frozen cooked fish is (imo) yucky, but reheated frozen cooked stew is tasty.
My favorite for dry takeout rice is fried rice. You literally cannot make decent fried rice from fresh rice, it must be old and somewhat dried out.
Yes, exactly. It's totally fine to make extra plain chicken, and not so fine to make extra fish.
(What IS it with fish? Usually the only way I can stomach it leftover (aside from fish cakes) is to eat it cold.)
My solution is not to buy fish for home cooking.
I used to end up with a lot of leftover fish when we lived on a lake and my husband and sons would go for marathon fishing excursions. If I had to cook, say, a huge pike and inevitably had some left over, I would either make fish cakes with it, or, my eldest son's favorite, a fish pie in which the leftover fish was mixed with a cream sauce and mushrooms, then topped with mashed potatoes and baked. Even I, who doesn't even really like fish the first time, must admit it was pretty good.
It's great cold! My favorite lunch is leftover salmon or cod. Mix some herbs (chives and dill, or cilantro) into a little mayo and pretend that it summertime in Provincetown or Nice or wherever your fantasies like to hang out.
Our local grocery does salmon in portion sizes so I mainly get several when they are on sale and have to butcher package them up two per package. Since fish thaws pretty quickly, I can pull a pack out for a week night supper. This eliminates leftover fish.
I agree with everyone else. Second day fish - no bueno.
My standard “use it up” for leftover fish is to make potato soup and turn it into chowder.
Have you tried heating the fish using the warm feature of your oven? You may have to leave it in there for an hour but my hubby likes anything he BBQ's to be warmed by this method rather than the microwave.
I shred leftover fish with a fork, add cream cheese, lemon juice and chopped parsley and you get a tasty dip. Also I only ever make fishcakes with leftover fish ♀️
What about freezing left overs? And then having a left over dinner one night? Just about everything you can freeze 🙂
If they're freezable, then yes, this is a great idea! But some things just don't seem to freeze very well (or maybe I am just picky!), and so if I throw them in the freezer, I'm not going to want to eat them and will just end up throwing them away later.
(I did a lot of this delayed type of wasting back in the day.)
If something freezes well, then I'm very comfy erring on the side of making extra. But if it doesn't freeze or reheat very well, I try to be careful about how much I make.
I finally came to the same realization about buying produce mindfully a while back. I kept buying produce with such good intentions and then throwing it away. I finally reached the point where I would go to the store and buy only the produce I needed for cooking that day. I cut back on my fruit purchases. This really helped me reduce my waste, although I have a long way to go.
When we don't seem to be keeping up with the fruit, I make fruit salad and it miraculously vanishes. For odd bits of vegetables, I tend to make stir-fry or curry once a week and throw in the last bits of greens, the third of a pepper, and even leftover cooked veg (at the last minute) that haven't been eaten.
I was worried that I'd be throwing stuff out with the every two weeks shopping plan, but so far I have had less waste. It's motivating to use everything when you dread returning to the store!
I've gotten creative at using up the last of my fresh vegetables - mostly by throwing them into something they aren't really meant to be a part of. LOL
For instance, yesterday I made the Cream Cheese and Bacon Corn as a side dish for dinner. It didn't call for it, but I chopped up the last of a head of cauliflower (it wasn't going to last much longer) and sauteed it with the onion and pepper. Not only did it bulk up the dish a little, we couldn't even taste it. I do that with yellow squash, mushrooms, celery, carrots, all kinds of stuff, really, all the time. It's amazing how often a vegetable that isn't really called for in a recipe works just fine.
So...my daughter uses Walmart pickup a lot and she was ordering bananas. She would order 2 bunches and each time, she got 2 bananas. So she ordered the item stating “each” and asked for 6. Guess what she got? .....Yup, SIX BUNCHES.
She brought us banana bread and banana muffins so far. She has four kids so they’ll work their way through some, but jeez! SIX BUNCHES.
If I see that we're not using milk as fast as I planned, I'll start making whipped coffee in the morning instead of hot coffee. Delicious!
...or freeze it!
Cream freezes really well, and yogourt last way longer than the expiration date. Organic spinach last longer before getting slimy than regular one (the ones packaged in the plastic bins)
My son shopped for us and bought 10 lbs. of potatoes, instead of 5. Gratefully potatoes can literally be used in hundreds of ways and in 100's of things! And cooked and frozen.
We love roasted asparagus around here, but sometimes I over buy. So I've started to blanch the fresh asparagus (a minute or so in boiling water) and then freeze them. I roast them with some olive oil and salt and pepper at higher heat, straight from the freezer, and they turn out great! Not something I ever thought to try before.