Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions--Oct. 5, 2012

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.

 This Week's Food Waste

Basil that has seen better days.

We didn't have a rotten tomato this week, yea! However, we had more waste than usual. We had basil and parsley that went bad before it was all used as well as a few grapes and some cracker dip. Nothing was horrible, but more vigilance may have prevented some of this waste. However, I have a theory about why we had more waste than usual--we cooked more than usual. See True Food Confessions for more details.

This Week's True Food Confessions

Look how much we cooked this week!

This week we actually planned and shopped ahead. A first in several weeks and guess what? When you have a plan, things go more smoothly. Among our dishes were pasta salad, enchilada casserole, potato soup, sloppy joes, meat loaf, spicy noodles with meat and green beans, green salad with cottage cheese, vegetable soup, and zucchini bread. Because we had more groceries in the house, we had more waste this week, but I'll take it. One thing at a time and now I vote for more cooking at home.

However I confirmed that if I do very much cooking, I get annoyed with all of time it is taking. Take Saturday as an example when I tried to catch up with a few things I had been meaning to do. First, I made a pot of chicken vegetable soup with leftover vegetables from a vegetable tray. Not a very hard thing since the vegetables were already cleaned and just had to be chopped. Same for the chicken. It just had to be zapped and cut up. So far, so good. Next I decided to make some yeast bread. Well, I have a bread machine for this, so it was relatively easy with no kneading. I hadn't used the machine in a while, so it took a little review of the instructions, but no big deal. Next, I made ice tea for the fridge since I have been wanting to have a better alternative to soda. And you know what? I had an ice tea machine to help with this also. However, Theo and I spent a while trying to get the right ratio of tea bags to water and tea to sweetner.

To top it all off, I made chocolate zucchini bread. I had a zucchini in my vegetable drawer that was living on borrowed time and needed to be cooked before it showed up in next week's food waste. I got the food processor out to shred it. However, by the time I was done, there seemed to shredded zucchini everywhere. Nevertheless, I had enough for the recipe I liked and enough to put into the freezer for a couple more batches.

So let's evaluate the day. I made vegetable soup, bread, tea, and zucchini bread all with the aid of appliances. It doesn't sound like much, in fact just a simple meal. However, by the time I was done, I was done. Done with the kitchen for a while. So I've confirmed what I already knew. If we are going to be successful with cooking at home, we have to keep it simple.

Note: Everyone else in the family likes being in the kitchen less than I do.