Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions--Apr. 20, 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

n o t h i n g

This Week's True Food Confessions

I'm pleased because it was another week of when no one felt like cooking for various reasons, but we ate mostly at home.  Among other things, we had breakfast burritos, mushroom lasagna, hamburger stew (otherwise know as fridge clean out), pizza, tuna mac, and take out from California Tortilla. Ward wants to make Thursday nights Cal-Tort night and maybe we will. (BTW, they have a new teriyaki bowl that is quite good.) We'll see if we can keep this up, but a lot of other things seem more important than cooking these days.

I also managed to try a new recipe this week. I made Spinach and Mushroom Lasagna from Slow Cooker Revolution, by the editors of Cook's Illustrated (America's Test Kitchen). The lasagna was quite good and got a big thumbs up from everyone. I considered it a bit rich, so just a little piece was satisfying for me. The others just thought the richness was one of the things that made it really good.

Because America's Test Kitchen does extensive experimenting with their recipes, the textures of this dish came out well. The recipe had you precook the noodles and use jar Alfredo sauce because they found no-boil noodles came out mushy and home made Alfredo sauce separated while cooking in the slow cooker. 

This recipe was very hearty and tasty, however I won't be making it often because there were a lot of steps to prepare it. When I think of slow cooker cooking, I think of dump it and forget it like I did with the stew this week. I think I need to spend a little more time with this book to see if I can find some simpler recipes that are more my style. (and I just renewed it the library, so I have some time.)

Until next time...