It's a salad-y week.
Every week, I post a picture of the food that has gone bad over the last seven days. Why do I do this? Because in March of 2008, I finally got fed up with the amount of food I was wasting, and I thought that showing my waste to other people would motivate me to use up my food instead of wasting it. Because this often embarrassing practice was so helpful for me, I invited other bloggers to join me in posting their food waste photos, and Food Waste Friday was born.
Or a greens-y week. Or something.
The bad news? Greens are really healthy, so it would have been lovely if we'd eaten them.
On the other hand, they are super easy to compost. They'll turn back into dirt in no time.
During an interview this week, I was asked about the weirdest thing I'd ever done to save food from being wasted, and immediately I remembered the awful time I mixed some leftover lemon/onion salmon into my scrambled eggs for breakfast.
G-ross.
I think I did make it through that plateful, but I'm not sure I've cooked salmon since.
If you've had a food-waste-save that turned into a fail, do share in the comments. 😉
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Today's 365 post: This thing is a life (er, back) saver.
Joshua's 365 post: One birdie, two birdies...
Oh no, at least you have a compost bin, so it's not going into the bin. I can't wait until our garden is ready and we can just pick and eat what we need. I had to buy a big bag of salad greens two weeks ago but it lasted for most of this week and the last bit went into the freezer before they went squishy.
I wasted some leftovers and some tomato paste this week. We could have eaten the leftovers, but they just weren't that tasty so they were left in the fridge all week. I'm hoping for no waste next week.
I used to waste those cans of tomato paste a lot, but now I use it, and put the rest in a ziploc bag and put it in the freezer. Now, no waste, I just need to remember to use it up! 😉
I am still chugging along on a massive amount of potato salad that I made last week to salvage some potatoes (the rest were so gross). I love potato salad and usually scarf it, but I forgot to put in the egg and pickle on this batch, and not enough mustard (I was in a hurry) so it just seems to be lasting forever. One more big serving left that I will probably have for breakfast. I am doing really well otherwise. The potatoes have been the only spoilage since I moved almost 2 months ago. I have just made a rule that if it's close to its end, it doesn't matter if I don't feel like eating it, that's what I will eat.
I think I've blocked all of my bad food waste saves from my memory because I can't think of any. This week I didn't do any saves, so I threw away some evaporated milk.
I have a hard time eating salads at it is. Yeah, I'm definitely not a salad-y girl, but I'm trying to get better at eating more healthy - one step at a time.
Nothing in particular (a bad lettuce leaf here, a moldy raspberry there), which is a great relief after the fiasco that was last week.
Best Save:
The brussels sprouts I roasted didn't fit my mood so I used them, hashed, in an omelet for dinner last night.
Home composting is a wonderful thing, isn't it? While I always hate to have wasted something like salad greens, I don't feel so badly knowing they'll be back in the soil in a matter of weeks.
Just trying to use up or freeze the garden produce which is rapidly mounting in my kitchen this week. So far, no waste, but we'll have to see if we can eat all this or get it in the freezer.
My 7-week streak has come to a close. I found some long forgotten soup in the back of the fridge and the garden cucumbers that my friend gave me got slimy before I finished them.
I didn't finish about two forkfuls of lettuce that I brought for lunch one day this week. I pack ridiculously large salads so I can fill up, and this was just a SMIDGE too much.
On a separate note: I went grocery shopping on Tuesday this week (three days after I normally go). I didn't buy anything out of the ordinary, and since I knew we'd be going again this weekend, I bought less than I tend to.
My normal $50 budget? Blown. Completely. I spent closer to $80 this time. I cannot BELIEVE how much produce prices went up! We aren't wasting anything, which is good, but my heart hurts to think of those less fortunate who are buying a lot less fresh produce because of these prices!
Could there be an upside? Higher prices mean people wasting less? This article was posted this week on the Chicago Tribune (it's from the LA Times). I'm not surprised, and didn't think it was "news". But it lit up my Facebook nonetheless! "Americans toss out as much as 40% of their food": http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-food-waste-nrdc-20120821,0,7810321.story
Sad b/c last week, had nothing wasted and this week - plenty of things wasted though in small amounts. This week has taught me to just continue being OCD with checking things in the fridge and keeping on top of rotation.
I still want to know how they come up with a waste figure, as they don't go through our compost piles or trash? How in the world could one waste nearly half of what they buy at the grocery store? That just isn't possible. I mean, we all waste some on occasion, but not that much.
You know.. I'm pretty careful about my waste. But some folks? It's out of hand. My grandparents buy TONS of food each week for just the two of them. And I'd say they throw out a garbage full of stuff each week that goes bad. Same with other family members... each time I'm over, they have a fridge PACKED full of stuff for only two people, and lots needs to get thrown out.
I'd say there are probably more out there who just don't know how much to buy for their family. And don't watch what they actually consume 😡
I think some people are also fear mongered into thinking that if they go past the expiration date they will die or get sick if they eat a product, and just throw it out even if it is perfectly good. Some people just think if they've had it a week, then it needs to be thrown out. A bit of a shame, when you think of all that goes to waste, but I've forgotten about various things in my time, so who am I to judge?
Bad meat and a rotting tomato....wasting meat makes me really sad!
My aunts just perpetrated the world's worst food-save fiasco upon our family at a reunion a few weeks ago in Montana:
Day 1 - Delicious dinner of grilled salmon with a lemon cream sauce, an Israeli couscous salad, and a three-bean salad. Tons of leftovers.
Day 2 - The aunts decide that the leftovers can be cleverly repurposed, so they mash the salmon and add it to the couscous salad, toss in the three-bean salad, and stir in the lemon cream sauce. But the salad is served cold, which means the lemon cream sauce is sort of curdled and lumpy. The vinegar of the three-bean salad is a total mismatch to every other flavor. Extremely gross. Most family members pile a small serving on their plates, take a nibble, gag, and throw it away.... but there are STILL tons of leftovers.
Day 3 - Undaunted, the aunts decide that the Day 2 salad was bad because it was "too dry." This is solved by adding ranch dressing, Italian dressing, and some feta cheese that was leftover from another green salad. The resulting concoction was looked and smelled so awful that only a few stalwart family members even tried it. Three pregnant ladies in attendance excused themselves gagging.
As expected, there were still a lot of leftovers. These were divided between two aunts to be taken home.
Day 4 - One aunt wisely threw the leftovers out. The other aunt thought there might still be some value in the old salad, so she pressed the leftovers into a casserole dish, put cheese over the top, and baked it. Unbelievable! She brought it to the table and everybody just burst out laughing.
We are still laughing about the insanity of the never-ending salmon couscous salad, and I'm pretty sure that it's going to become a favorite family story. Next year we'll have to plan our portions better, so the leftovers don't tempt the frugal aunts into attempting scary food combos.
Thanks for the smile....sounds like our aunts are cut from the same cloth 🙂
Too funny!
Ugh...I wasted a whole beautiful bell pepper. Almost a whole onion but I managed to cut off the yucky part! We have been vacationing and running the roads so there isn't much in the Ray household fridge so I am disappointed with the bell pepper. But we must carry on! 🙂
Your request for our food-fail took me back to December 2010 (not long after I started blogging and No Waste Tastes Great) - I had such high hopes for my celery gratin. I can barely type the word celery anymore after that taste experience! Live and learn eh?
I too have salad in my Fridge for the photoshoot this Friday, but it's about to accompany a veggie lasagne for dinner. There was still half of the huge courgette/zucchini hanging around. Even after prepping tonight's dish I have some left over for FG Choco Bread - Hurrah! Now that's a food-waste-win!
A little bit of yogurt here. No saves here this week.
There's not much worse than slimy greens. No way to save. At least you can compost them. Even though I may waste something, if I can compost it I do feel a tad bit better about it.
Salad is tough. Sometimes it seems to last for ever and other time's bad before you get home with it. Thankfully my husband has been on a greens/salad kick lately.
No food waste here this week bar a little teeny bit of pasta and rice for the chickens! Food waste save-turned-fail has to be the rocket pesto that I made a few weeks ago which looked great, tasted really really bitter.
I once cooked a really tasty red Thai curry with a tilapia filet as the protein. I had a lot of sauce leftover, so I figured I could just heat it up and then cook some chicken to mix in. The chicken curry had a strong flavor of fish and the two together tasted horrible! Never again mixing the meats of a sauce- especially fish.
What is it with fish leftovers?? So many of us have had those go horribly wrong.
Salmon and eggs? That sounds pretty gross. Somethings are just impossible to salvage..
This week I hardly had anything to throw away, just a pitcher of homemade flavored water that tasted bad. I couldn't bring myself to drink any of it, but luckily the mint I used grew in our garden and it was only a bit of orange juice and orange zest that I had actually paid for in this whole pitcher.
It totally was. The lemon part really put it over the top.
Ok, this may not totally count, but I thought of your post when it happened. I went to make a caprese salad, got my tomatoes that had been sitting out a little while (but not overly soft, I had been waiting for them to soften up, which they weren't overly doing) and they had little bumps on them, I cut them open to find a bunch of sprouts in them. The seeds inside the tomato had sprouted like an alien. Anyone else had that?! Kinda grossed me out... After looking online, people said it was fine to eat and didn't necessarily mean they've gone bad. I ate them. They were fine, though a bit odd with the crunch and taste of bean sprouts with the caprese!
That has happened to me. I cut up the tomato and planted the pieces and got tomato plants. But that was back in the pre-GMO days, so I didn't know you could still get tomatoes that would sprout!
I finally cleaned out the freezer and had so much food waste! Lesson: Pay attention to what's in the freezer as well as the refrigerator!
You inspired me to save some bananas and bake banana bread today. They got gross quickly... no clue as to why they did that. The bread is a hit so I froze the remaining banana for the next time. Also, your quick and easy slushie recipe has made me Mom of the Year. Thanks for all of your inspiration!
I hate it when veggies go to waste, but at least you can compost it 🙂
I wasted a whole bunch of leftover chili. It was so far gone, it looked like a science project.
Don't use coconut oil to cook a scrambled egg, it turns it green! Bleck!
Not the best food waste week for me. I had bought a small bag of cucumbers at the farmers market about a week and a half ago with the intention of making some counter top pickles that I had seen a recipe for. But never got around to doing the recipe and I looked at them the other day and about two of them were soft and had white ooze. The rest were covered in the white stuff and I tried washing it off to keep them/use them, but couldn't seem to get it off and was so disgusted I threw out the bag. That is our only food waste so far. But may be set up to have some in the coming week, as I have some turkey cold cuts that are close to going and I need to check my homemade mole sauce that I would like to use on Tuesday for a crockpot dish. Hope it is still good. I sometimes have bad luck with homemade tomato based items going bad real quick.
Okay, just went through the refrigerator and have to add a 1/4 cup of cooked breakfast sausage and 1/2 cup of cooked pasta. Both could have been used, but just never happened. So far my mole sauce looks fine. So this week maybe $3 worth of wasted food for me. More than I like.
Have you come across food saver bags? They are good for extending the life of fresh foodstuffs. It can be up to two weeks depending on how fresh the veg was to begin with.
I hate it when you waste good food to try and save bad food. Anyway, I tried to make cold coffee into a jug of iced coffee but didn't realize my milk had gone sour until after I had mixed it in. I also had put the chocolate syrup in, boo! It was about 3 cups worth and I had to throw the whole thing down the sink.