Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions--August 24, 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

We only used half of this can before it languished in the fridge.

This week I threw away 1/2 can of evaporated milk. We used half of it in one recipe and I planned to use the other half in some soup. It turned out that Wally and Theo made the soup and didn't know about the plans to include the milk. By this point, I thought it was probably too old to freeze, so I watched sit in the fridge until it was definitely too old to use anywhere. Then out it went.

This Week's True Food Confessions

We were away for a few days last week and during the long drive, we talked about our new eating habits. The evening scheduling we were trying to do for dinner just hasn't been working because of the variability of work hours. However, we still want to target a specific time for dinner to be ready, and then people will eat when they can. We feel if we don't have a certain time for food to be ready, we're more likely to let things slide.  Also, we can feel ourselves starting to slide back into the takeout world. We think that we haven't gone overboad yet, but we want to be cautious of the slippery slope. We made a pledge to do better with planning and shopping which is the key to everything. We acknowledged that we are eating less junk food because there are good leftovers in the refrigerator.

Now onto what we fixed this week.

A sampling from this week.

Spinach pie: Simple to make with fresh spinach, Parmesan cheese, and spices in pie crusts. Next time I would like to try it with a healthier crust.

Zucchini, Green Bean, and Feta Cheese Casserole: Wally and Theo made this dish based on what we had in the fridge. The feta cheese and fresh lemon juice made it tart but creamy. This was a new dish and we will make it again.

Sloppy Joes: I added shredded carrots to this to get a more vegetables to our food. Usually I add chopped spinach, but we just had the spinach pie, so I used carrots instead.

Grilled cheese with bacon and Granny Smith apples: Yum! I had to do something with the bacon I baked.

Once again, we hope to have a supper plan for a week, and all of the ingredients on hand for it. We've never quite made it yet, but practice makes progress as Wally likes to say.