I am so disgusted.

It’s only Monday, and already my hopes for a no-waste week have been dashed. Oh, the pain!

I opened a can of beans last week to use on our Shrimp Taco Salad, and Lisey and I(we’re the only one who eat beans!) ate a fair amount of them then. Some other day last week, I made a salad just for myself for the express purpose of using up some of the beans. And then tonight, I made a salad for everyone, and I was going to use the rest of the beans. Unfortunately, when I opened them up, they smelled terrible, and I noticed small bits of white mold on them. Sigh. For a brief moment, I considered eating them anyways. Then the memories of my food-poisoning experience flooded over me and I reconsidered.

The beans are now in my compost bin, and my fridge now smells better(rotten canned beans smell really, really bad). Still, I’m annoyed…annoyed that the beans went bad so fast and annoyed with myself for not using them earlier.

In making dinner, though, I did use up the last of a head of lettuce, some hairy carrots, two random egg whites, the last of the cantaloupe and two leftover pork chops. It just would have been that much better if I could have used up the beans too. Oh well. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of the last 5 months, it’s that avoiding food waste requires an ever-watchful eye. When I don’t keep daily track of the contents of my fridge, I usually manage to let something go bad.

Currently, there are two things in my fridge that are worrying me…first, some green beans from my mom’s garden(we got a big bag last week and have eaten probably 2/3 of them, so that’s good!), and then half a bag of spinach. I never buy spinach, but I got it in order to make a Cook’s recipe for pesto pasta salad. I’ll probably try and throw it into a salad, and then I also want to try one of those green smoothies that I keep hearing about. And I think we will have steamed green beans with our taco salads tomorrow night. That’s about as inauthentic as you can get, but you gotta do what you gotta do. 😉

I’ll do my usual food-wasting post at the end of the week, and maybe I will be so successful in using my food that the beans above will be the extent of my waste.