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.
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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.
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.
Last time I went home to visit my parents, we ate at an incredible brunch place (Tasty and Sons). Anyone who watches Portlandia can tell you; in Portland, we love brunch!
(Yes, I have waited in lines that stretched down the block just to eat breakfast, just like in the show. They were candied bacon doughnuts, and they were marvelous.)
Instead of "put a bird on it", I "put an egg on it."
I noticed that at this brunch place, they put a fried egg on top of everything... seriously, everything. I got Moroccan Couscous with sausage, dates, and an egg on top. There's something about the creamy goodness of a fried egg that makes food taste like breakfast.
Easter is today, so it seems like a good time to talk about how to use up extra hard boiled eggs. Lucky for you, I recently had to use up thirty-six of them, and cooked eggs can’t be frozen without making the whites tough.
Here's how we used 36 hard boiled eggs: First, I let my three-year-old and my one-year-old eat as many as they wanted. This wasn't hard because they were reaching their fingers over the edge of the table trying to get at them. Incredibly, the three of us ended up eating ten the first day.
I was introduced to the beauty of salami by a friend of mine who liked to sit inside the refrigerator when she snacked.
The first time I spent the night at her house, I woke up in the morning, went into the kitchen, and found her sitting on the ground with her elbows propped up in the fridge.
"What on earth are you doing?" I asked.
"Eating salami." "Why?" "Because it's good. Try some." I took a slice of plain salami, and she was right. It was amazing.
I greatly appreciate all the links and ideas my readers send me. One of my readers showed me an article about a group of people in New York who are saving food that restaurants throw out.
Sorry I can't share the link; I have to cook potatoes before the turkey is done (which led to the inspiration for this post), so I don't have much time to finish this article.
The founder of the organization in New York was inspired when she ordered potato peels at a food cart and asked the owner what he did with the potatoes after peeling them. He said he threw them away.
The potato is one of the most versatile and beloved of foods. Wasting such a resource that could have easily been converted into a desirable dish...that's just bad business! Luckily, the woman asked for the potatoes and delivered buckets and buckets of them to a homeless shelter. After reeling from disbelief for a minute or two, I stopped and said, "Wait, wait, wait. People eat potato peels? Willingly?" I had to investigate. Turns out, you can roast potato peels, and they are delicious. It's a win-win all around; they're nutritious, they're free, and I can set them on a plate for my hungry kids to munch on while I finish dinner. I realized as I was peeling my potatoes today for our Thanksgiving feast that a lot of nutritious peels were probably being thrown in the trash at that very moment, so I ran to my computer in hopes that I could inspire others to save the peels before it's too late. Here's what you do.
I am a wizard. Seriously, Harry Potter and Gandalf got nothing on my magic.
After troubleshooting and creative problem-solving, I have… (Dumroll, please.) …I have learned how to make rock hard cookies – cookies you could chip a tooth on – into warm, gooey, melt-in-your-mouth cookies that taste fresh. You don’t have to preheat your oven, and it takes less than two minutes. Bow to me, for I am magnificent. Now I’m going to tell you a rather long story about my Cookie Rescue Journey in order to drum up SEO stats. If you lose interest, scroll to the bottom of this page to see My Secret, plus the secret to keeping cookies from going stale in the first place. Some of you might be wondering why such a skill as reviving stale cookies is even necessary. After all, you can make a big batch of cookie dough and bake as few cookies as you want at a time. Well, we recently had a garage sale, and I had the genius idea to make a bunch of baked goods to sell. We made a decent amount of money off of them. Except, I made waaaaaaay too many treats. The cupcakes got put in the freezer and were defrosted and re-frosted (with frosting, I mean) for church potlucks. The ginger cookies are my husband’s weakness and were soon devoured. The chocolate chip cookies were another matter. I won’t tell you just how many we had left over *cough, two dozen, cough*, and they were already sort of stale by the time we hosted the garage sale. So we had a problem. The problem could have been prevented, though, because…. TO KEEP COOKIES FRESH …all you have to do is store them in an air-tight bag or container with something moist, like a slice of bread, a slice of apple, or a tortilla. I wonder if a wet paper towel would work, and then you don’t have to waste bread and tortillas? The cookies suck up all the moisture and this keeps them soft. But by the time I found out about this technique, the cookies were already hard enough to throw on the floor without breaking. I tried warming them in the oven. Bad idea. I meant to keep the cookies in there until the chocolate chips melted, but they never did, and the cookies were burned. This is hard for me to admit. Burning cookies is an unforgivable sin, not because it’s wasteful, but because they are cookies. Mama loves her cookies. My next attempt was the microwave. Also not a good idea. Microwaves don’t cook evenly, so they’re really only good for food you can stir up. Also, a microwave only heats up water, so if the food item doesn’t have any water in it (i.e. stale cookies), you end up with a tough cookie that has pockets of warmth scattered amid spots of cold. Yuck. Here is when my stroke of genius happened. We like to eat frozen Asian buns, which are usually steamed. To make heat them in the microwave, you wrap them in a wet paper towel to infuse moisture. I thought, I could zap the cookies to make them moist, then bake them to make them evenly warm and also crisp on the outside. Except baking in the oven is a huge pain and the toaster oven isn’t much easier, so I thought, why not use the toaster? Voila. Heavenly cookies in less than two minutes. In summary: TO MAKE STALE COOKIES TASTE FRESH
You are welcome. If you try this, let me know how it worked out! |
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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