Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions--Feb. 22, 2013

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

 None!

    None!

              None!

This Week's True Food Confessions

In the center is a cabbage roll--our new recipe for the week.

 
This week, when we had our favorite takeout pizza, I realized that we hadn't had it for at least two or three weeks. Remarkable, considering we had it at least twice a week before. And yes, it tasted as good as we remembered. We had the rest of our vegetable-rich meals at home. While the carnivores in the family would have preferred a big steak, they didn't complain when meat was only a condiment in most of our dishes. However, the best treat we had required no cooking--grapefruit. This is the time of year for citrus and these grapefruits were certainly proof of that.

The new recipe we tried was Stuffed Cabbage with Tangy Tomato Sauce. I got the recipe out of the latest Prevention magazine, but it is also available online. The recipe was good, but was not hit-out-of-the park good. Everyone had several servings, but gave it only decent reviews. Theodore and Ward thought it was too sweet. The recipe called for 2 tablespoons of sugar and I would cut that in half next time I made them. And speaking of next time I make them, I would change the recipe quite a bit procedurally. There were entirely too many steps for me. You had to make the sauce and simmer it, and you had to cook the cabbage multiple times to get the leaves off to stuff, and you had to cook the rice, and you had to brown the meat and onion. And then you had to assemble it all and cook it in the crock pot for five hours. Golly, that's a week's worth of meal preparations for me.   However, we do like the combination of cabbage and tomatoes, so next time I will probably use this recipe as a basis for a cabbage stew. Or I'll just let Theo make it. He made an excellent cabbage-tomato soup recently with just a little of this and a little of that.


So how would I rate this week overall? Pretty good. However, I can feel that we're starting to slip a little. That's because I start too late to cook. Then I'm tired or something else I have put off is calling me louder than the kitchen. I'm going to try to get some of the prep work done before I go to work. That should help. Until next time...