It's been a long time since I posted on this blog. I returned today for a very good reason.
I came up with a new recipe! Back in Mississippi, I got so good at using all my food scraps that I stopped inventing new recipes. There was no reason to. I only bought what I needed, and I used what I bought. But then, we moved in with my parents. Let's just say my family members aren't food waste warriors. Still, I try to live my conscience, and we're all on the same page in that regard. That's why I was able to serve my family a pot full of "stuff I found in the fridge," and they were game to try it. Soup as a Way to Use Up Food I've heard this over and over again: "When you have a bunch of scraps in your fridge, throw it all into a pot and make soup." I love the idea, but I was too nervous to try it. What if the soup was terrible, and then I wasted even more food? But today, I had no choice. Like most Americans, my parents keep their fridge crammed with as much food as they can fit. It drives me nuts. Today, none of it made sense as a meal. My mom was making homemade bread. "I wish we had soup to go with this," she said. I took a deep breath and decided to give it a try. I made soup out of scraps. Thankfully, the soup was delicious. We had no soup leftover, which disappointed everyone. I wish we could have more! Broth versus Stock Part of what made this recipe so good was the stock instead of broth. Broth is water that has been boiled with animal bones; stock is water boiled with bones, vegetables, and herbs. Typically, you drain out the juice and toss all the boiled vegetables, which I don't like, for obvious reasons. I often keep vegetable scraps in the freezer (onion skins, carrot peels, celery leaves, etc.), and when the bag is full, I'll boil it with a rotisserie chicken carcass and some salt, garlic, pepper, bay leaves, and basil. I usually freeze the stock until I decide to make soup. You can buy stock at the store right next to the broth. If you don't have any stock, you'll want to add garlic and herbs to your soup. That's it! Easy, and delicious. Another scrap saved! Creamy Cauliflower and Sausage Soup
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When I was a teenager, my grandma decided to buy a pre-made, frozen Thanksgiving.
She reasoned that it was too much of a hassle for everyone to agree on what they would have, to divvy out the assignments, and to do all the cooking. It would be much easier to just pick up a meal that someone else had made. Many of us were horrified, but the decision of a family's matriarch always stands, so frozen turkey it would be! Here's the thing, though; it takes just as long to reheat a frozen turkey as it takes to cook one. We were expecting to eat in thirty minutes or so, and it looked like we would have to wait four hours. My blood sugar can be finicky, and I'm notorious in my family for getting hangry (hungry + angry enough to kill.) We were not going to have a good Thanksgiving with thirty starving people, especially if one of those people was me. I couldn't very well make a snack for myself without feeding anyone else, so there was nothing else for it. I would just have to make snacks for everyone. I've always been good at making meals out of whatever I have on hand, or "scraps," as we call them in my house. I scoured the shelves and found every platter we had and pulled out all the breads, cookies, chips, crackers, meats, cheeses, and spreads until there were nearly a dozen appetizer platters on the counter. (I could never do that in my own home, but my parents don't follow the "don't buy too much food" rule, so their kitchen was fully stocked.) I spread cream cheese on ham slices and rolled them up; I popped popcorn; I even put frosting in a bowl and arranged gram crackers around it to use as dippers. Everyone was grateful, and they still talk about the day I saved Thanksgiving. It was a proud moment for me. The point of the story: you can freeze your Thanksgiving leftovers. I should know. I had a defrosted Thanksgiving feast at 9:00 pm that night. I've had a hard time explaining to people exactly what I'm doing with No Scrap Left Behind.
Most of us try not to throw out good food but will do it whenever it's necessary. When I said I don't waste food, they often say, "I don't either." But that just isn't true. When I tell people the average American throws out 15 pounds a month -- which would add up to 60 pounds for my family of four -- they scoff because there's no way they throw out that much food each month. Because they don't understand the weight of food or how much gets tossed, I told people I only threw out 2-5 pounds a month and they weren't impressed. It sounds like more food than it is. (My cube weighs 3 pounds.) Then I started telling people I only threw out as much food as I could fit in my hands, but even that was too broad. I can hold a lot of potatoes, for instance, and I can hold a whole watermelon, but I can't hold very much rice. in my hands. Did it count if I put it in a bowl? How big a bowl are we talking about? Finally, it occurred to me; I should just show people how much I throw out! The idea came to me via Trash is for Tossers. The woman who runs that blog lives in an apartment with no room for a compost bin, so she puts all her compost in her freezer until she can take it to a facility. Brilliant! I started keeping my own compost in the freezer so I wouldn't have to run out to the backyard five times a day. Now, I keep my food waste and my compost in two separate containers in the freezer. Just as a reminder: food counts as waste and not compost if it fails the Hungry Kid Test. The Hungry Kid Test helps me decide which foods I have to eat and what I can throw away. If I would put the food in the garbage right in front of a hungry child, it's compost. If I would give it to the kid, it's food and I cannot waste it. Banana peels and apple cores are technically edible, but they pass the Hungry Kid Test, so they go in the compost container. A quarter of a hamburger, on the other hand, fails the test and would go in the waste container. From now on, I'm going to post monthly photos of the food my family wastes, and I'm going to share with you the lessons I learned that will help me to avoid the same mistakes in the future. Lessons I learned this month: - Don't assume you know how long restaurant leftovers will last. - Don't leave the cap off your milk because flies can get in. - Keep clips on all your bags so your kids don't get into the cupboard and spill lentils all over the floor. - Keep the floor clean so you can spill things without covering them in dog hair. - Read the instructions carefully before making popcorn from scratch for the first time. - When you turn a burner from high to simmer, make sure you're adjusting the right burner. Figuring our how much food to buy for big events is a big pain. You don't know how many people are going to come, you don't know how much they're going to eat, and you don't know which foods they are going to pass by and which foods they're going to scramble to get. I'm the Young Women's President at my church, which means my counselors and I plan all the lessons and activities for the teenage girls. We host a fundraiser every year for a week-long summer camp, and this year, our fundraiser was a taco bar. We also did an auction. Members of our congregation brought items and services for people to bid on. But you're more interested in food, so back to the tacos... Other anti-food waste advocates will tell you to only serve as much food as you think people will eat, but, come on. No one is going to do that. We're all going to buy way too much, and then we're going to fret that it still might not be enough and buy more. There's no point in fighting against human nature. Instead, my philosophy is to plan ahead of time what you're going to do with the inevitable leftovers. (I should point out that the attendees did throw out food that was on their plates. Rule #6 of Living Food Waste-Free is guests can throw out their own leftovers. All the food that remains in my jurisdiction, however, is my responsibility -- or, in this case, it was our responsibility.) When I throw birthday parties, I only serve food my family is willing and able to finish by ourselves. On my daughter's 5th birthday we had chips and nacho cheese, and probably only two people ate some. I had invited twenty-five kids, and even though we were satisfied with the seven that came, I still felt like I had to buy enough for twenty-five kids and their parents and a possible sibling tag-along...just in case. That meant one of those huge cans of nacho cheese from Sam's Club and two of their big bags of chips. You can toast stale tortilla chips and I think you can freeze nacho cheese, but I had purposefully served food my family loves and we ate all the chips and all the cheese before kitchen hacks were necessary. It was delicious and I have no regrets. Fundraising events are a little trickier than birthday parties. You can't just take home food that was bought with church money. I had to come up with a meal I could serve that people would like and have a plan for the leftovers without putting church money in my own pocket. For the fundraiser, we expected about seventy people. I ended up buying seventeen pounds of ground beef, two pounds of black beans, two pounds of rice, among many other things. Around forty-five people showed up. So, we had a lot of leftovers. By the way, I want to brag that all the food for the fundraiser fit in my refrigerator. Step 2 of my Waste-Free Kitchen Program is not to buy too much food. If your fridge is so crammed with stuff that you can't see the back, you can't possibly eat it all before it goes bad. My small fridge was sparse enough to easily slide in enough food to feed seventy people! What I did: I gave away taco soup. We donated portions of it to church members who we thought needed a free meal for one reason or another. Another scrap saved! Actually, a LOT of scraps saved! Taco soup was perfect because we didn't know how much of each food we'd have left, and you don't need exact measurements to make it. All I did was get two big pans and dump in all the taco meat, black beans, tomatoes, salsa, corn, and black beans and add water until it was soupy. We separated the remaining cheese, sour cream, and corn tortillas into Ziplocs and small containers and put the soup into reused plastic containers. I love keeping old plastic containers because they're perfect for giving away food like this. I only use CLEAR containers for my own leftovers -- that is a firm rule in my house! I hate opening up a cool whip container only to find rotten potatoes and chorizo inside that I had forgotten about. I keep the non-clear containers so I can give away food without stressing about the loss of my precious Tupperware. I am really proud of what we did that day, not just because we raised money for camp and then donated food, but because I was able to be a good example to the young women. They did all the cooking for this event, so they earned the money themselves. I had them put all the compost in a bowl for me to take home and the recyclables in a pile. Making the soup taught them to be responsible with food, and donating it taught them to think of other people and their needs. It was a really good day. I love roasting vegetables. It's an easy, delicious way to add a lot of produce to a meal. The other day, I decided to try out a new recipe that called for eight different vegetables. (Cue ominous music.) When you buy eight vegetables, you end up with a LOT of vegetables. We would never eat them in time if I roasted all of them at once, so I cut the recipe in half. I usually cut my recipes in half anyway, especially when it's a new recipe and I don't know if it will turn out. I am grateful for my foresight, because the roasted vegetables were terrible. My husband, who is usually a good sport when dinner isn't super, picked out the vegetables he didn't like, and it took a great deal of firmness to get my children to finish them.
(If you feel making my family eat gross vegetables is cruel, I will point out that un-tasty nutritious food is a first-world problem.) Reheating the leftovers made the vegetables even worse. There was no way I was going to roast the rest of the vegetables in my fridge. Which left me with a significant problem: what could I do with the odd assortment of vegetables I was now stuck with? I puzzled over this problem for a while until I realized procrastinating it any longer would lead to waste, so I put all the vegetables I owned on the counter and would not leave until I had a plan to use them. A while back, I posted an article about what to do when little kids ruin their food. My children are older now, and that means a whole new set of food challenges. They don't destroy their food anymore. Gone are the days of chucking food on the floor or dumping a cup of milk on their plates. Thank goodness. However, they've also gotten smarter, and sneakier. Now they can talk me out of eating their food. I'm still the one who dishes up their plates, so I won't make them eat everything I give them because I don't know how much they want. That wouldn't be fair.
For the most part, though, I've figured out when they are actually "full" and when they just want to leave the table. If they've eaten half their plates and tell me out of the blue that they're done, I always believe them. They don't get a snack between dinner and bedtime, so they have no incentive to lie. If they've eaten all of their pasta without touching their vegetables and tell me they're full, sorry. That's not going to fly. If they're eating just fine and then something more interesting comes up, it means they aren't full. We've had to stop telling them, "Finish eating and then we can (insert fun thing here," because they will inevitably be "done." There are a few recipes that are so simple, I finish them and just sort of stand there feeling like I missed something. "Is that really it?" I wonder. I feel that way with baked potatoes. When recipes are so simple that I feel like I'm getting away with something, the usually go in the crock pot. Anyone who has used a crock pot knows of its magic; you dump in the ingredients, leave the house, and come home to dinner. I have yet to test the limits of everything a crock pot can do, and for a long time, it seemed like the only crock pot recipes I could find were shredded meat (like my Green Chili Tacos) and pot roast. I wanted to make complete meals in the crock pot, not part of a meal. Then my mom made me ham lentil soup when she was over, and I am forever grateful, because we needed a good ham recipe. My husband's job gives him one free turkey every Thanksgiving and one free ham every Christmas, and the ham so huge that we have slabs of it crowding our freezer all year long. So, this recipe is #anotherscrapsaved
Since all the ingredients besides the ham are dirt cheap -- lentils, carrots, celery -- it's basically free dinner for us. ...which is convenient, since I've made a goal to save $300 a month in groceries. It's going well so far, but I haven't quite made my goal, so it's too soon for me to present my methods. Stay tuned. But you came here to learn about ham and lentil soup, so without further ado, here's my fav cheap/easy/yummy soup
We’ve all reached inside that bag of chopped lettuce and pulled out soggy brown squares that leave slime on our fingers. Gross. Lettuce is frustrating because you can’t cook it or freeze it. Either you eat it raw, or it goes bad.
Luckily, it’s very easy to extend the life of leafy vegetables.
Every week my local grocery store has tons of buy-one-get-one deals. Everything else at this store is more expensive than Walmart, so I typically go there to buy only the sale items.
It’s fun to swipe my card and see my charge on the cash register literally get slashed in half.
The deals are so sweet that I’ll buy anything I think my family will eat and then I'll plan most of our meals around the food I bring home.
Last time I went, though, I made a mistake. A lot of the sale items were freezer foods. I didn’t stop to think if all those items would actually fit in my freezer. Oops.
The title of this post is not overly-exaggerated click bait. This recipe will seriously only take ten minutes of your time – in fact, it’s the easiest recipe I use.
Of course, it takes 3-8 hours after you prep it to cook it.
It seems to me that the longer something takes to cook, the easier it is to make. If you plan ahead an hour or two – or eight – quite often all you have to do is toss ingredients together and put them in the oven or crockpot. |
I will never waste food againI've been tired of throwing out food for years - not to mention tired of our huge grocery bill! I decided to make a change and vowed never to waste food again. In this blog, I'll show you how I do it. RECIPESArchives
January 2020
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