Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions--Dec. 21, 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. (Thanks to Simply Being Mom for hosting Food Waste Friday this week.)

This Week's Food Waste

I had no waste this week, but to be honest, I didn't look very hard to find any. But I'm still going to go with no waste. Yea!

I saved some oranges by making Christmas ornaments out of them.

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This Week's True Food Confessions

Some of the food that graced our table this week.

Let's see. We had two work luncheons and a Christmas party this week where we took our new favorite thing--seven layer dip with tortilla chips. Wally took some to a party last week and it seemed like a good idea to take everywhere else we've gone. I think we're going to add a meat layer to it and have it for supper next week.

And speaking of Wally, he made his "famous" Ramon noodle dish which has spicy tomatoes, ground meat, and noodles in it. He has a complicated way of making it, or so it seems to me the simple cook, but it pleases every time. I made one of my favorites, spinach pie. It's very simple and is essentially spinach and cheese between two pie crusts. I got the recipe from a friend at work and I'll be sharing it soon in another post. We also had pizza and salad one night and chicken and cauliflower another. In addition, we filled up with cookies during the week from holiday baking and sharing.

I can't recall that we had any takeout this week, but just as I didn't search too hard for waste, I'm not going to think too hard about it. I'm declaring this week a success. Yea!

There's a Mouse in the House

or Caution: This involves dead mouse talk 

 'Tis the season for field mice to come into our house seeking warmth.  This is an occurrence we have every year and we've gotten used to. We usually find them in the same place--between a couple of studs in our coat closet. Apparently, they enter from somewhere above and fall into this area. Then, they are the ultimate, "I've fallen and can't get up" victims.  We finally figured this out after Ward followed his nose and cut a couple of holes in the wall where he eventually found a stinky mouse graveyard. After that, he put a plate over the hole so it could be opened and he could rescue any fallen mice.*

This seemed to work pretty well until this week. Then we got a smart and determined mouse. This one chewed it's way out of the graveyard and has been able to elude our four cats for a couple of days--an unheard of feat until now. The longest any creature (bugs, mice, moles, voles) lasts in our house is a couple hours before the cats have taken care of it. Just when we think that this mouse has escaped or is dead, we see the cats very attentively watching under a door or a piece of furniture. And there's only one thing that that can mean--there's still a mouse in the house. And as much as I hate to admit it, I'm scared of this little mouse. So wish me luck that today will be the day that this smart and determined mouse will be gone.



Update: I found the mouse and I think the cats won. Now to put on some gloves and toss it outside.


*We have an ongoing discussion about rescuing the mice or if we should let nature take its course between the cats and the mice. I vote for the cats because one, it is very natural and two, I don't want to handle the mice.

A Second Look--December 19, 2012

Here's what I saw this week during a Second Look.

Scraggly mum

This is a very light weight bone fragment. Not sure what that means or where it came from.

Male downy woodpecker

As evidenced by the sticks and leaves around this groundhog hole, the groundhog is in hibernation. When it is in an active stage, the hole has fresh dirt around its entrance.

I found several tufts of fur like this, but I'm not sure what it's from. (I vote for rabbit.) I looked for more signs of the animal, but didn't find any.

The forsythia tried to bloom during a couple of our warm days. However, they didn't last for long.

Blue jay feather

Squirrel's nest in sweet gum tree

Dried Orange Slices

or It Should Have Been Really Simple

A few weeks ago, we bought a big bag of Cara Cara oranges that I think were picked too soon--meaning they were tasteless. I mean the only taste they had was from the floss you used after you ate one. So after three oranges in a row like this, the family decided they weren't going to eat anymore. What were we going to do with the rest of the bag? Let it sit in the fruit drawer until the oranges rotted? Certainly that was going to be the default plan, but I was hoping for something better. Then I remembered lovely dried orange slices I had seen as Christmas ornaments. That's what I'd do, I dry them for decorations.

After a little Googling, I found several instructions on how to dry them, and they were all basically the same. Cut the orange into thin slices. Place them on a lined cookie sheet and dry them in a 200 F oven for 2 1/2 to 3 hours. Easy. My kind of craft.

 However, all didn't go as planned. On my first attempt, the slices were rather uneven, but I thought this shouldn't matter much. I put them in the oven and checked them occasionally. Every time I checked, they were still wet. After 5 hours of this (2x longer that it should have taken) and not much progress, I turned the oven up to 250 F. Some instructions listed this as a drying temperature, so I thought it would be okay. And you know what happend? When I checked them 1/2 hour later. They were burnt.
 
On my next attempt, I made the slices thinner, but they were still rather uneven. This time I never turned the temperature above 200 F and turned the slices occasionally for even drying. After a few hours, I started removing the thinner slices that were almost dry and left the moist ones. All was in line for success. And you know what happened?  They burned again. It seemed to happen quickly between two of my frequent checks.

Now I was getting a little worried. In the many instructions I had read about drying orange slices, no one had indicated that they had had any problems. I could soon see myself in a joke like the one about being such a bad cook they couldn't even boil water. I was going to be such a bad crafter, I couldn't even dry orange slices.

But I tried again. I had Ward slice the orange for me this time and I put the slices in our dehydrator. I dried them for several hours until I had beautiful dried slices. Hooray! Maybe there was hope for me after all because I did it my way. (Cue Elvis.)

Gingerbread Cookies

Wally and Theodore decided to bake gingerbread cookies this weekend to share with their friends and coworkers. They asked Uncle Billy and Aunt Martha for a recipe since they bake a lot of cookies this time of year. The recipe they sent was a really good one. It adds orange zest and lemon juice along with a nice balance of ginger and other spices.  I think it's the hint of citrus flavor you taste when you eat the cookies that makes them stand out above others I have tried.

The recipe is from the Food Network's Alex Guarnaschelli. Wally and Theo didn't make the orange icing part of it (too much fuss for them icing or decorating cookies), but I can imagine that this would be a very tasty addition. If you are interested in trying them, here's the link: gingerbread cookies.

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But Wait, There's more:

I mentioned that Wally and Theo didn't want to fuss with icing or decorating their cookies. Well, I didn't even want to cut out the batch I made. I just rolled out the dough and put the entire rolled sheet of dough on the pan and baked it. And you know what, my pan tasted just as good as the ones they cut out and baked. Have I mentioned that I don't like to spend a lot of time in the kitchen cooking or baking?