Friday, July 25, 2014

Food Waste Friday & True Food Confessions-Jul. 25, 2014

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. Also, I am using this public forum to encourage us to eat out less which includes better meal planning. You can follow how we are doing in this endeavor by reading True Food Confessions. Occasionally, if our eating is going okay, I'll talk about some other food topic.

This Week's Food Waste

NONE

I had my eye on the prize this week, so I had no food waste. I plan to keep this vigilance up for next week. Wish me luck.


This Week's True Food Confessions




The meals this week were focused on preventing food waste as mentioned above. First, we had some left-over chicken and some yellow zucchini to use. This turned into a zucchini casserole with chicken and a salad. The salad had cherry tomatoes in it that were just starting to shrivel. The zuchinni-chicken meal lasted us for two nights. 

Next, I had some hamburger buns and pizza crust languishing in the fridge. The pizza crust came from an almost disaster a few days before. As I was taking a pizza out of the oven, it started to slide off the pan. I managed to catch it before it hit the floor, but about a quarter of it lost it's toppings during the save. So I retopped it with jar sauce and some fresh tomatoes and mushrooms that needed to be used. I also added cheddar and feta cheese for a really tasty result. I did the same thing with the hamburger buns after toasting them. 

Now I had a jar of open tomato sauce, so we had this over spaghetti the next night. I added some fresh tomatoes and basil to fix it up a bit and to use them up before they started to go bad. I also made a fruit salad to add to this meal from some ripe peaches and blueberries. And speaking of fruit, we also had some very good yellow water melon from Uncle Billy's garden. 

It was good week. I realize that some of you cook like this three meals a day, but not me. My interests and time usually lie elsewhere, so I'm gonna have to say that I am very pleased with this effort on both the Food Waste and Food Confessions fronts. :)

Until next time... 


 

8 comments:

  1. I've never heard of a yellow watermelon!

    I think you did a fantastic job with food waste. As for cooking ... I realize it's not the most frugal choice, but we eat a lot of cereal for breakfast. We frequently eat sandwiches for lunch (my hubby eats leftovers from supper the night before). We rarely eat out, so I cook supper weeknights, but my hubby cooks supper on weekends. I DO spend a fair amount of time baking, but for me, that's a fun activity. A lot of my meal-planning is similar to yours--oh, we have leftover hamburger buns and leftover cooked chicken--chicken BBQ sandwiches it is! Or ... we have a surplus of lettuce in the garden--we're eating salad for our veggies this week. If we get a build-up of leftovers, it's a smorgasbord night. I find that I am more likely to do intensive cooking in the winter--during the summer, we are pretty busy and my priority is not spending time in the kitchen.

    Love the story about the near-disaster with the pizza. We all have had those moments ... several years ago, I was going to take a meal to a friend & her family after she had surgery. I made a lovely casserole with lots of cheese on top. Somehow when taking it out of the oven, it tipped over onto the floor of my apartment, which was carpeted. I had a panicked moment of thinking, hmm, I could scrape everything into the pan and cover it with more melted cheese (which is a bear to get off of carpet, in case you were wondering!) ... but I ended up taking them Subway subs.

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    1. Now the question is, "Would you have scraped it back into the pan if you had been eating it at home?" You know, reheating it with cheese to kill the germs? :)

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    2. Well ... yeah, I probably would have. Should I admit that publicly??? Probably not ...

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    3. I won't admit it publicly that I would probably do that too, if you don't. :)

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    4. I think we're a very practical, frugal group. :)

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  2. Great job on no food waste!

    I feel like I'm burning out on cooking this week. I've been finding myself rushing to get dinner ready on time, and some nights it's been very late (almost 8 PM last night). This time of year I have other things that occupy me. We had a lot of thrown together meals for the week. My family didn't seem to notice (except that dinner was very late). Sometimes, I think we need a vacation from what we do everyday, including cooking, even for someone who normally enjoys cooking like me.

    You are very fortunate to receive all this wonderful produce from Uncle Billy. I'm sure you are enjoying it all! Does yellow watermelon taste any different from red watermelon?

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    1. I am very fortunate with what I receive from Uncle Billy. He likes to garden, but has a very limited diet. Therefore, he always has giveaways. The yellow watermelon tastes much like red. I got some last year after seeing it for the first time at a farm stand. I was totally fascinated by it. Now this year, Uncle Billy is growing it. :)

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What do you think?