Friday, July 13, 2012

Food Waste Friday, July 13, 2012 and True Confessions

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. 



Here it goes for this week.   

Wasted potatoes

This week I had to throw out some mashed potatoes. They may have been okay except that they were stored with meat, so didn't want to chance it. We probably made too many in the first place, so we'll try to cut back next time.






Now onto true confessions. We don't waste much food anymore with the help of our public accountability, but we have another area that we struggle with. We eat out way too much and that's not good for us nutritionally or financially. We have never been able to sustain the habit of menu planning and cooking at home for any length of time.



There are several factors contributing to this:

  • Everyone has a job or school that keeps them busy.
  • No one in the family likes to cook.
  • Everyone in the family likes takeout food. 
  • No one likes to plan menus. 
  • Everyone in the family can drive. 
  • No one likes to shop. 
  • Everyone has money to spend.

We have tried a lot of different ideas to get us to eat at home more often realizing that planning is the key to success. We have had family meetings to plan menus. We have assigned menu planning on a rotating basis to everyone. We have subscribed to menu planning and cooking sites. We have had serious talks about the health consequences of most take out food. We have had a theme to our menu plans like Mondays are pasta days, Tuesdays are chicken days, etc. And the list goes on with Wally's planning being my favorite. He randomly opens the cookbook and then we get to choose from between the two recipes he has opened to. 

A few of our past menus.

I am going to take another stab at this and use public accountability as the new tool in my belt. So each week along with food waste, I am going to report on how we did with our menus and cooking. Maybe I'll try posting menus or describing a new recipe we tried. We'll see. Does anyone have suggestions?