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.
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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 |
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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