"My husband won’t eat food that’s over a day old. He’ll eat the leftovers the day after I make something, but not later than that. What should I do?"
Goodness, if I knew how to change men’s minds I’d have a very different blog and I’d be making a lot more money.
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The secret to happiness is meal planning, and the secret to meal planning is keeping a family cookbook.
But how do you start? It might seem daunting to even remember all the meals you like, much less how to cook them. Luckily for you, I created a FREE Family Cookbook Worksheet. It's 17 pages of everything you need to get started on coming up with and collecting recipes. Just enter your email in the sidebar and it will be sent to you. Why keep a family cookbook? There are many reasons, but here's a few of them:
Happy cooking, and happy eating! I've been stunned and giddy at the affect my blog has already had on people. All my friends are telling me how they're inspired to throw out less food. I love hearing all their tips and success stories! (And I'd love to hear yours, too, by the way!) But my blog is still new, and it has yet to reach outside of my circle of friends. I have plans for promotion, but the best promotion is word of mouth. That means you! If you want to do the earth a favor, you can share my blog or follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Do you wonder what reducing food waste does for the environment? When animals are slaughtered and plants are harvested, we're taking nutrients out of the earth... and we don't give them back. The waste from the food we use goes into the sewer; sewage is cleansed and put back into farmland. (For real. Click here.) But the food we don't use gets dumped in landfills to be buried by non-biodegradable waste where it is of no use to anyone. Maybe the earth has enough available resources to sustain us even if we're wasteful (I'm not exactly willing to take that chance), but we don't have access to all the earth's nutrients. We only have access to what's in our farms. When our farmland is depleted and dead, it's not like the farmers will kick us out of our homes because we kept compost bins and the soil we live on is still alive. They might cut down a forest, though. The best thing is to not buy more food than we need. Then less food will be taken out of farms, the price of food will go down, there will be more food available to give to the hungry within and outside of the US, families will have more money to spend on themselves, that will help the economy, and when our economy thrives, it helps the economy of other countries... Reducing food waste is pretty important! Thank you for supporting me, supporting the end of hunger, and supporting the planet. Happy Earth Day!
In my last post, I talked about why I made my own baby food, one of the reasons being that there's zero waste because the food is yummy enough for me to eat if baby doesn't finish it. In this post, I’ll talk about how I made it and stored it.
First, storage: when my baby was really young and only ate 2 oz at a time, I’d store the baby food in tiny Tupperware containers and put them in the freezer. You can also use ice cube trays. Before bed, I’d try to put in the fridge approximately what the baby would eat the next day.
"What do I do with the food my baby doesn’t eat? I don’t want to put the jar back in the fridge after her spoon has been in it."
Kids are the ultimate food wasters. Right now both you and the baby are figuring out what your child likes and doesn’t like, and there will be a lot of trial and error. She’s building a new relationship with food, and hopefully it’s a healthy one, so I don’t recommend forcing her to finish the jar if she doesn’t want it.
âWeâve all looked through our fridge and found that take-out box of rice from a month ago that no one wanted â where the rice is so rock-hard, you could use it to kill a mouse.
If your rice has reached a state of fossilization, donât worry; thereâs still hope! You can make congee.
You probably think that at some point, I’m going to say to use old bananas to make banana bread. That’s what everyone says: “Those bananas are going bad. Oh well, I’ll just make banana bread.”
Well, I’m not going to tell you that. Don’t get me wrong; I like banana bread, it’s just that this blog is about using up food to reduce waste, not making more food that needs to be eaten.
Here's my first question from a reader! I would love to get more questions to help readers rescue their food. If you want some advice featured on this blog, please leave a comment!
What do you do with extra food when there isn’t enough of it to make a full serving? I save it! Once for lunch, I had half an egg salad sandwich and a slice of leftover French toast, and my daughter had ½ cup of leftover tomato sauce penne and a bowl of sour cream. (Sour cream is both my daughters’ favorite food, and it’s cheaper and has less sugar than yogurt.) It was an oddball lunch, but it was still tasty. Think of it this way; when I make meals from scratch, it costs $5 to $10 to feed my family of four each meal. If I serve a strange collage of half-meals that I would have thrown away, it’s almost like eating free food. I can save $5 to $10 just by putting scraps in a Ziplock and serving them the next day. Easy money.
I recently found myself staring down thirty-six mutilated hard-boiled eggs and wondering what to do with them.
They were supposed to be deviled eggs for a funeral, but the whites adamantly clung to the shells. Large chunks of egg whites came off as I peeled them, some to the point where you could see the yolk. They looked so bad that I actually picked up a ball of discarded white play dough thinking it was one of the eggs. About eight eggs into the unshelling, I was mad enough to punch a puppy. Finally I slammed my fists down and declared that I would have to serve something else. Like I mentioned in the last post, my husband decided to make white cupcakes the same day I announced to him that I was never going to waste food ever again. As he mixed the batter, I asked him to add some almond extract. Almond is an underappreciated flavor, which is a shame, because I love it in baked goods.
I went into the bedroom to fold laundry as he finished the cupcakes, and when I came out, he was sitting on the couch with a sheepish grin on his face. “Um,” he said. |
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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