I'm from the Northwest, and when I married a Southerner, I learned that not all of the United States is the same. At all.
The biggest surprise to me was the cuisine. My husband introduced me to a whole world of foods I knew nothing about.
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I’ve been going around different websites to discover other methods of reducing food waste. Many of the ideas are good, but quite often I run into things I doubt the writer has actually tried. Every time I see a recipe for potato peels and apple cores, I shake my head because that isn’t food; that’s garbage.
It occurred to me that I should be specific on this blog about what I feel comfortable throwing away versus what I do not. Here’s the standard that I follow, and it goes back to when I was inspired to start this blog: Studies show that the average American family wastes enough food to feed an additional family member. As soon as I heard that, I unintentionally imagined the fifth member of my family who could have survived on the food I was throwing away. In my mind, he is a small child from Africa – I call him my African Ghost Baby. Every time I chucked rotting food in the garbage, my Ghost Baby would be there, frowning at me. After years of feeling guilty and ashamed while my African Ghost Baby watched me, I decided I couldn’t take it anymore. I would no longer throw away things that my imaginary family member would have eaten. So that’s my standard: if a hungry child would eat it, I don’t throw it away. I feel fine taking the onions and pickles off my hamburger, but I do not feel fine wasting a quarter of the hamburger. If I let food go bad that a hungry child would have eaten, I have been irresponsible with my resources. What inspires you not to waste food?
Of all the foods we used to waste in my house, rice was Culprit #1.
Lots of it gets stuck on the bottom of the pan or the rice cooker. After you eat the part that’s still good, the leftover rice gets hard and dry pretty much the second you put it in the refrigerator. Rice can stay on your counter covered for one day before it starts to get slimy.
"How do you freeze food so it doesn't get freezer burn? I too freeze leftovers my family is tired of eating, but when it sits in the freezer for weeks it gets frost on it. Then, my family refuses to eat it. Is there a solution for this?"
I don't blame your family; freezer burn is nasty. Air is the cause of freezer burn, and the longer food stays in the freezer, the more time it's exposed to air. The solution is to keep air away from the food as much as possible. That's why they sell those vacuums that seal up food.
Another reader question! I love these.
Do you intend to make your children eat everything on their plates? No. My philosophy is if you eat food you don't want and your body doesn't need, that counts as wasting it. Also, it's more important for children to learn how to listen to their body's hunger cues so they can become responsible eaters.
And really, if I’m the one dishing up the food, making them eat all of it isn’t fair.
I love avocados. They’re rich and creamy, not to mention extremely nutritious. Did you know, that’s the only food you can eat exclusively and still survive? Nothing else has enough nutrients.
But I digress; another great thing about avocados is they’re versatile. If you only buy them for guacamole, you’re missing out
It’s not easy for a new food blog like mine to stand out from the plethora of blogs on the internet. It occurred to me that if I really wanted to teach families how to use all their food and eliminate waste, I needed to do something unique to get traffic to my site. Maybe I’d come up with my own recipe.
Then I remembered: The Falling in Love Pie.
When my husband and I were newlyweds, I loved the movie Waitress. The main character, Jenna, creates pies based on her emotions and experiences. Example: I Hate My Husband Pie and I Don’t Want Earl’s Baby Pie, aka “Bad Baby Pie.” (I made Bad Baby Pie once. It was yummy.)
A friend begs Jenna to make her "magic" Falling-in-Love Pie. While the movie describes how she makes every other pie, it didn’t explain how she made that one. It was early enough in my marriage that the feeling of falling in love was still fresh in my mind, so I decided to come up with my own version. (At the end of this article is an extremely healthy, easy, and delicious recipe for a pasta dish jam packed with vegetables.) Okay, so sure, I want the prize money for the contest I'm about to tell you about -- it would almost completely cover the cost of grad school -- but let's put a pin in that for a sec and talk about how helping me win would be a great thing for everyone else, too. Home and Family is hosting a contest for the Best Home Cook. I think the fact that I never waste food makes me a unique and memorable candidate, so I made a video about a vegetable pasta sauce made from the random vegetables that happened to be in my fridge today. The winner will fly to Los Angeles and actually be on the Home and Family show. Yeah. THAT'S pretty cool. All I need are enough likes, shares, and comments on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube for my healthy vegetable pasta video to get the judges' attention. Community involvement is huge.
All I need...is you. I've mentioned before that my inspiration for this blog came from stories about the famine victims in Yemen, Somalia, and Nigeria. There are always famine victims somewhere in the world, but these particular famines affected me so deeply that I wanted to help. While doing research for a novel I'm writing, I read about a Haitian woman who would give her children salt water before bed so their hunger pains wouldn't keep them awake at night.
That just hit me in the gut. I have two toddlers, and it physically hurts when their needs aren't being met. What it would be like to hear them crying for food and to have nothing to give them? |
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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