The potato, lettuce, and banana situations have been resolved.
Well, mostly.
Last time I did a Food Waste Friday post, I had an abundance of potatoes, lettuce, and overripe bananas.
Here's my potato collection from that post. After making clam chowder, mashed potatoes, potato bread, and potato wedges, though...
this is what I have left. And the three sweet potatoes just came in this week's produce box, so they barely even count. 😉
Oh, and to use up the older dry sweet potatoes, I peeled, boiled, and mashed them and subbed them for the pumpkin in these pumpkin chocolate chip muffins.
I made 24 and they are all gone as of this morning.
So, the potato situation is resolved.
The banana problem didn't have quite such a happy ending.
I used up almost all of my pile of ripe bananas, but these ones languished until they were really unusable. I should have frozen them, but I kept thinking I would get to them and I did not.
I know overripe bananas are good for baking, but I felt that these had gone past even that point.
On the lettuce front, I have a mixed report.
I had SO much lettuce to deal with, thanks to a mistakenly delivered extra produce box + sick people who weren't eating anything.
But I am happy to say that I only wasted this much:
And as of yesterday afternoon, I had only this left:
But.
I actually used that to make a salad for Mr. FG's lunch today, so I have officially made it through all of that lettuce.
Phew.
And thank heavens Romaine lettuce keeps so well!
In other news, someone cut up a lime, used a little bit of it, and then left the rest to go bad. I suspect one of my children is the culprit.
And these beans are more my fault. We had a few left over when I made sauteed green beans, and I was so busy eating other leftovers, these got ignored.
I don't know why I didn't just eat those at the time...usually I just serve myself whatever is left because I know no one really is a huge fan of leftover green beans.
Other random saves that I did not photograph: I sauteed some mushy apples in butter for breakfast and I used a few other mushy apples to make some Apple Pfannekuchen.
Here's what my fridge currently looks like.
By the way, all the greens in there are new arrivals! I really did use up all of my original lettuce. 😉
And here's the door, which is mostly condiments.
So, I had a few losses, but overall I'm pleased with how well I managed to get through my abundance of produce, and I'm super pleased that everything in my fridge is pretty darn current and fresh.
Things are looking promising for this week, I think.
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How did food waste go at your house this week? Share in the comments! And if you need ideas for using up something in particular, feel free to leave a question. Readers here are super helpful.
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P.S. I'll be back at noon to post a giveaway for the cute felted wool kits I showed you yesterday on Facebook, so check back in!
May I congratulate you on your food saves, but mostly on your sparkling refrigerator! I'm mostly impressed with that. 🙂
Ha, thank you. I cleaned it out thoroughly some weeks back and thus far, it has not descended into its former grimy state. Here's hoping I can keep it clean for a while!
Food waste is definitely an area that could use improvement at our house. The notable wated food item this week was some leftover cauliflour that had been forgotten at the back of the fridge. The odor. Oh the odor.
Even fresh cauliflower is not so, um, fresh smelling. And the rotten stuff is just noxious!
Well, I did poorly, I think. I will usually eat leftovers for lunch, too, but this week I could barely slog through them and ended up splitting two eat out lunches with my college kid, and one big one from Chik-Fil-A, all to myself! I also tossed a few freezer lunches that had been in the freezer since the Fall. Today I have some things to eat up, so I resolve not to get lunch on the run. However, last night I did add the rest of a small can of tomato paste and half a bell pepper to some soup. I felt downright virtuous!
Hey, any small victory is something to celebrate! So, yay you!
Great idea for the sweet potatoes! I've been trying to think of what to do with all of mine before they go bad.
Try putting them into chili or stew! They add colour and taste great. I also sometimes mix them with other potatoes and mash them with butter and milk (DH is not as fond of sweet potatoes as I am).
Your refrigerator is so clean and organized! Our only waste was one cantaloupe that went from hard to lumpy and soft overnight.
Hello Kristen
I have wrote before.i live on curaçao and life is very different from the USA,but if I ever have food over,like from a diner party or such.i give it away,there is 2 elderly people close by,and I often bring them a meal.most people do that here.my husband work downtown and if I have lots of stuff ,I make meal package and he give it to some homeless guys on the parking lot.would that be crazy in America?
Also now I have lots of bananas and papayas from my trees .I share with friends and when their tree bring fruit,they share with me.
I also have 3 dogs and 12 chicken ,and plenty of teenage boys that visit my daughter ,so food shortage are more likely here.
I threw away way too much food from my freezer and fridge (two full kitchen trash bags)! All I have to say is my family had better start eating apples because I still have a bunch of those!
Hi Kristen,
Maybe you already mentioned this in a previous post, but how often do you receive the produce box? And do you alter your meal planning depending on what food you get, or can you change your order to suit your meals, or a bit of both? I've though about doing this for some time now (since there are lots of companies that deliver in my area) but I'm in such a good meal planning groove that I'm afraid I'll end up wasting food.
It's just every other week normally, and I get a list of what'll be in it two days in advance. So that helps!
Also, since I frequently use the produce as side dishes, I can usually make the box contents work with whatever main dishes I've planned in advance.
Hi, I do not know how behind I may be, but I've had great success freezing bananas. I peel them, wrap them in saran wrap then put them into a freezer bag.
Sigh--bad week at my house. I had to throw away half a bunch of celery and two and a half heads of broccoli! I don't understand it. They normally keep that long in my fridge no problem. Went to get broccoli out for snacking, and ewwwww. I probably could have frozen the celery for making broth/cooking beans with, but I already have plenty of fresher celery bits in the freezer, so I just tossed it.
Something I learned from Glad: poke a bunch of small holes in a zipper plastic freezer bag and store the broccoli in there. It keeps FOREVER that way. And you can just keep the bag for the next time you buy broccoli.
That's a great tip! Thanks!
I've baked with bananas that were that brown many times before and I've always had delicious results!
I try to buy brown bananas at Save A Lot on purpose just for that... they usually discount them at $0.29/lb and most of the time the skin is spotted but the bananas are just fine. I've stopped baking so much with my new goal of getting healthier this year, so now I put mine in my morning oatmeal. The browner they are, the sweeter 🙂
You did well! (And hopefully everyone feels well, too.)
I don't think I had any waste this week. The bananas are all frozen with maybe 5% unusable. And the compost pile, she is full, full, full! So are the freezers. I have four gallons of frozen bananas stashed at my friend's house because only one 2 gal bag fit in mine.
I did have to compost some of the scallions that my houseguests left me, but most went into a scallion sauce and - as y'all may remember - I don't consider myself morally culpable for food I didn't bring into the house.
I made a veggie/bean/brown rice soup that turned out only so-so. I'll eat it for lunch over time, so it's not wasted but it's not overwhelming.
There was waste after all. I tried to convert a slow cooker recipe to stovetop, and the step of simmerin chix in water to make stock totally ruined the chicken meat. So 6 drumsticks sacrificed themselves for fine stock, but that was an inefficient way to do it. So I consider the drumsticks to partly wasted.
You know, Cook's sometimes suggests making stock that way but I cannot bring myself to waste perfectly good chicken to make stock!
I posted my weekly food waste post today too (http://imperfectlyfrugally.blogspot.com/2015/01/food-waste-friday_16.html) and I'm glad to report that we did very well although we could have done getter if I hadn't neglected to use a few greens that I had harvested from my garden... I'm not brave enough to take a picture of my fridge and post it, though...
Kristen,
New time before you toss those bananas keep the peels and mix them in with your potting soil around your roses. My mother always did that and the potassium help produce amazing roses!
I have some Costco organic apples in my crisper that have NO flavor. So, we don'teat them. Any suggestions as to what to do with them?
Apples with no flavor, make apple sauce. I've added pears and/or cranberries and you'll have a delicious easy sauce. Peel apples and put in the crock pot with spices like cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg...add the pears (with skin on) and cranberries and cook until smooth. Stir every hour. Yummy and freezes beautifully.
I made apple pfannekuchen this morning too. Great minds think alike. Thank you for that recipe. I have used many of your recipes and my family thanks you.
It was not a good week for me & food waste, although not for the lack of effort. But I did make some saves -leftover chicken breast went to the dogs & they were happy about that. All my frozen rolls from Thanksgiving were not looking good as I did not wrap them well before freezing same with some bagels -those went to the birds n squirrels. Leftover ham was thrown out in the back yard for some starving critter, what veggies were rotten went to compost. At least a large black bird was flying away with either a roll or bagel in his possession. I also cleaned out some cupboards, dated peanut butter went to animal control for the dogs kongs & I am not sure what I can do with a number of canned soups that hubby wanted but did not eat and are really dated (early 2013 ex date). Ugh!
Might I make a suggestion about your fridge? Try storing your milk and cream (buttermilk, or whatever is in that carton in the top corner) into the main part of the fridge. One time I rearranged my fridge and started storing my coffee cream in the door, and it started going off 3 or 4 days before the expiration date, and was trash by then. I moved it back into the fridge, and now it is useable a few days past the date.
Apparently every time you open the fridge door it warms the things in the door a little and this causes them to spoil faster, but the air in the body of fridge warms much less. This might not be a problem with your milk if your kids go through it really fast, but with cream or buttermilk, I'd think a few extra days would make for less food waste.
I would say to store your soda or juice there instead, but I don't see any of that, so maybe your jams could go there, or pickles if you have them.
I've definitely heard this before, but the door is so stinking convenient for the oft-used milk, and since there are six of us here, I never have trouble with it going bad.
But I'll certainly reconsider once Mr. FG and I are empty-nesters and all the milk-guzzling offspring have moved out. 😉