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.

Cricket Season

or Entertainment for One and All 
 

A cricket on the back of my shoe

It's the time of the year that we seem to see and hear crickets everywhere. They're outside, they're at work, and they are certainly in our house. Quite a few of them as a matter of fact, especially in the basement. And that's where the fun begins.

A cricket hops, and the cats alert. Their ears go up and the tails start twitching. Annie, the lead hunter, moves closer to her prey and watches carefully for its next move. The cricket hops and she deftly swats it in mid air. They play that game for a little while. It hops, she swats. It hops, she swats. Then she lets it crawl behind a piece of furniture. Leo sees this as an opportunity, and moves in to be a part of the game. He waits as Annie pulls the cricket out with her mouth and drops it on the floor. Leo pokes the cricket to get it to hop again. With Leo and Annie watching, the cricket crawls into a floor grate to rest. Lucky now joins the game as they all wait for the cricket to emerge. The cricket finally comes out and somehow manages to crawl around the room, with three cats hunting it, and escapes under the door.

All the while, Ward and I are watching and marveling at the interaction among the cats and the interaction between the cricket and the cats. Entertainment for One and All and maybe even the cricket that got away.

Annie, Leo, and Lucky waiting for the cricket to emerge.

A Second Look--October 3, 2012

I got my feet wet during my Second Look this week because we had some really hard rains yesterday. I enjoyed exploring the rainy yard because raindrops, like snow, make everything look better. 

Here's What I Found During My Second Look this Week.

The rain brought out a new bloom of mushrooms.

Raindrops on bleeding heart leaves.

Raindrops on balloon flower.

 

Raindrop on dwarf Japanese maple leaf.

This is the only bug I found braving the rain. Usually they are everywhere.

Raindrops on Siberian iris leaf.

Spider's web

 

I found this praying mantis on a hydrangea the day before the rain began.

I Spy Brown

Can You Find:

1. A favorite album from my youth and today

2. A mask Ward brought back from a trip to Kenya

3. A nutty snack I have most days

4. One of the first fallen leaves from the oak tree in our front yard.

5. A twisting honeysuckle vine

6. Ward's yard shoes

7. Chocolate zucchini bread made from the last zucchini of this season

8. Sweaters that I am wearing more frequently as we move into autumn

9. A peanut butter sandwich

10. A basket of pine cones that sits on our fireplace

11. Lucy, our calico cat

12. French toast that we had for breakfast last Sunday

School Days--Irene

 School Days is a reoccurring feature in which I ask people about their early memories of school. Everyone has a story to tell about this and I hope to give them a voice here. 

Here's Today's Story

 Irene started school  in the mid-1960s when she was six years old. Her school was in a small town in West Virgina and contained grades one through eight.

Tell me about starting school or an early school memory.
I remember my mother took me to a meet the teacher day when it was time to sign up for first grade. I met the three first grade teachers, Miss Stemple, Mrs. Pettit, and Mrs. Dawson. Miss Stemple let me draw on her blackboard and I really liked that. Mrs. Dawson had a very different room. She had a big cage in the middle that had a squirrel in it. She also had a snake. She had a piano and the bench for it opened up to reveal penny candy that you could buy. I don't remember much about Mrs. Petitt, but she may have let me draw on the blackboard also.

After we had met all of the teachers, my mother asked me what teacher I wanted. She asked me if I wanted the room with the snake in it. I thought about it for a little while and decided that I wasn't crazy about the snake. She then signed me up for Miss Stemple's class. In retrospect, I think that's where she wanted me all along because that is who my sister had.

Did you like Miss Stemple? Was she a good choice?
Sure. I didn't really have any other teacher or school experience to compare her to except my mother who taught me how to read before I began school.

What else do you remember?
I remember that we learned Roman Numerals in first grade. We spent a lot of time each day writing them until we reached one hundred. Also, for most of the year, I played every day with Jimmy and Debbie on the playground. We were in different classes, so we would meet at the merry-go-round at recess. One day I couldn't find them and was quite worried and started to cry. I don't remember if I found them that day or not.

Thanks for sharing some of your memories. I hope another time we have time to hear more of your stories.