Food Waste Friday, September 23, 2011

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.    

Here it goes for this week.

Salsa: Good and better

We had a little bit of salsa left in a jar that has started to mold. It was good, but the salsa we made this summer with fresh tomatoes was better. Thus, the store-bought salsa got shoved to the back and forgotten.

Also, I recently harvested all of the green tomatoes off of a cherry tomato plant before I pulled the vine. Some of them did not ripen well (spots and mealy taste), so they're going out with the salsa.

Meet Lucky

Lucky

(so named after surviving an unfortunate

encounter with a slamming door as a kitten.)

L-Lucy's litter mate

U-Unusual coloring--black-tipped gray fur

C-Calm, except when the vet is involved

K-King of our four cats

Y-You'll love him.

A Second Look, September 21, 2011

This week, it really started to feel like fall with cool evenings and warm afternoons.The moderate weather, along with the rain we have been having, has started a new round of blooming. Some are plants that went dormant during the hot weather of August and others are fall bloomers only.

Also, this week's Second Look had a second look. Wally asked if I had walked around the yard yet and had I seen the big mushrooms. Well, I thought I had looked all over the yard, but I missed what he had seen. I guess that's why we need to do a second look sometimes. So after my pictures, you will see what Wally found interesting this week.

Sternbergia lutea
At first, I thought they were fall crocus.

The newly blooming sedum was teeming with bees and common buckeye butterflies.
(Thanks to Aunt Martha for the butterfly identification.)

Blanket flower. Another flower from this plant won a blue ribbon at the fair last week.

Four stages of black walnuts from freshly fallen to already eaten by squirrels.

The tree that the walnuts fell from.

Wally's Second Look--The Fungus Among Us

Book club

This month, my book club* read The Guinea Pig Diaries by A. J. Jacobs. Jacobs, who is known for his immersion journalism, does a series of life experiments and reports about them in this book. They range from outsourcing his life to India (they're making a movie out of it) to radical honesty to living by George Washington's 110 laws of civility. The book has been on the best seller list and even the critics liked it.

Here are what some "real people" (my club) thought about it.

• Everyone thought it was an easy, enjoyable read.
• Some thought that it was evident that the author's day job (writer and editor at Esquire magazine) was writing for men. Others did not get that impression.
• Some were pleased that the book was not as gimmicky as they thought it was going to be, but that Jacobs also thought about how he was changed by the experiments.
• We liked the fact that Jacobs did a coda at the end of each chapter to discuss what resulted from that particular experiment in the months following it.
• Everyone thought his wife was a saint for putting up with him. He doesn't tell her ahead of time what goofy (my word) thing he is trying to do.
• We thought that the experiments provided interesting jumping-off points for discussions. 
• Two of our jumping-off points were whether or not we have standards today for what is considered good or great things in culture, and whether or not the message of "be happy with yourself" is hindering people in a quest to better themselves.
• We also discussed how they award ribbons at the local fair, but we were a bit off topic at that point 

*A brief background of the club members. We are all women, but we vary in ages and political and religious beliefs. Some members are married and some are not. Some have children and some do not. Some have grandchildren.  Some are working full time, some are working part time, and others are retired. And the important thing is that we all enjoy discussing the books we read which if you are going to believe TV sitcoms, doesn't always happen.
 

This bowl used to be a lot fuller.

Disclaimer: This is my interpretation of what we discussed. Other members may have different ideas because they didn't get up as often as I did to get more M&Ms.

Food Waste Friday, September 16, 2011

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.  

Calamity 

Sometime in the last week, our chest freezer failed unbeknownst to us-- that is until the smell finally got strong enough to send us searching to find the very stinky, gross mess. Ward and Theodore, heroically, did most of the clean up of the many pounds of rotten meat and various other decaying things. They were on the front line because I had to go to work and Wally couldn't stomach the whole thing. He promptly volunteered to mow the grass.

Needless to say, much food went to waste. I don't have an inventory or really even want to know how much food went bad. It's sort of the "bury your head in the sand" ostrich response.

Until next time, when I hope for a boring post of maybe a tomato that got lost in the veggie drawer.