New blog

I've decided to start a new blog(yeah, I think this will be the last one!). The main topic of this new blog will be frugality, but I will be incorporating my no-food-waste mission into my frugal blog, with at least one post a week covering that topic.

Anyhow, the new blog is The Frugal Girl. I hope to move the recipes from this blog over to wordpress once I figure out how, but until then, I'll leave this blog up.

Menu(which is late again)

One of these days I will post a menu before we are nearly done with the week. =P Actually, I'm just going to post two weeks' worth(this week and this coming week) to get myself caught up.


Sunday

• Waffles(recipe is forthcoming on my baking blog)
  

Monday

• Chicken panini with cilantro pesto
  
• Mangos
  

Tuesday

• Grilled steaks
  
• Buttermilk biscuits
  
• Watermelon
  

Wednesday

• Tacos
  
• Fruit salad
  

Thursday

• Grilled steak sandwiches on English Muffins
  
• Grapes
  

Friday

• Stromboli
  
• Green salad
  

Saturday

• Ham Sandwiches
  
• Corn on the Cob
  

Sunday

• French Toast
  

Monday

• Asian Chicken Pasta Salad
  
• Grapes
  
• Dinner Rolls
  

Tuesday

• Shrimp pizzas on tortilla crusts
  
• Watermelon
  

Wednesday

• Chicken Wraps
  
• Apple Slices
  
• Chips
  

Thursday

• Deep dish pizza(which I've never made before...I'm trying a Cook's Illustrated recipe, naturally)
  
• Green Salad
  

Friday

• Grilled Hamburgers on homemade buns
  
• Fruit salad
  

Yay for empty plastic bags!

 

You might be wondering what is so exciting about this. Well, a few short days ago, this bag was chock full of a green salad. We had friends over for dinner on Friday who brought a green salad, and they left the leftovers with us. It was a large salad, so the leftovers were nothing to sniff at. I was pretty determined to not let this show up in my food waste photo though, so I've been eating salad for breakfast, lunch, and dinner(Ok, I'm kidding on the breakfast part. I have my limits!). Anyhow, tonight I ate the very last of it, and I'm very pleased about that.


 
In other happy, not wasteful news, I made chicken panini sandwiches with cilantro pesto tonight. And if you're a regular here, you know that I waste cilantro pretty often. Tonight, I made a large recipe of the pesto and used up most of the bunch of cilantro(usually I make a small batch which leaves me with a lot of cilantro), and I froze the extra pesto to use the next time I make the sandwiches. Now, all too often the freezer is just a pit stop on the way to the trash can, so the pesto is not out of the woods. But I'm going to try really hard not to let it get lost in the freezer...and probably cleaning and organizing my freezer would be a good way to avoid that. My freezer above my fridge is pretty generally a disorganized mess(is there such a thing as an organized mess?) and I know this contributes to my food wasting. I lose track of food in there and then it gets freezer burnt.

I still have a small bunch of cilantro left. I might combine that with the tomatoes that have gone a bit downhill and make some salsa.

Food Waste Photo-6.19

 

My twice weekly fridge cleaning seems to be helping me. It didn't drastically reduce the amount of food I waste, but I did actually get around to cleaning it, and I'm posting a food waste photo about a week after the last one, which is an improvement.

So, from left to right: some moldy french bread. We weren't too inspired about eating this, due to the salt issue...I should have made croutons. Next up: two hot dogs. They starred in a recent food waste photo, so I think I've decided to not buy/cook hot dogs anymore. As it is, we eat them rarely(usually only when I'm desperately low on time), but I think we'll eat them even more rarely from here on out.

There are also some bad tomatoes...I'm not sure how I let these go bad. We've been eating lots of salad...I guess I just didn't see these. Below those is a bowl of mayo based soy dipping sauce that we used with some kabobs. The recipe made WAY too much dipping sauce, though. As I was going to throw this out today, I thought better of it and decided that I'm going to try using it in a pasta salad recipe I have(the dressing on that salad is really similar to the dip). For the time being, it's back in my fridge.

Lastly, there are some, um, very fermented milk products...some regular milk, and some buttermilk(the liquid leftover when I made butter). These smelled so bad that I couldn't imagine that they would made edible baked goods(which means baking with them would probably make me waste other ingredients), so they got dumped out into my backyard.

I had another cup of milk that was slightly on the sour side, but I used it to make two loaves of oatmeal bread tonight. So, the milk waste wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. I haven't tasted the bread yet, but I think the milk wasn't far gone enough to give the bread a bad flavor.

The menu(late, of course!)

I could stay a lot more caught up on my blogging if real life didn't keep getting in the way. =P I'm going to put the whole week's worth of meals on here, even though we're a ways into the week already.

Sunday

• Crab Cakes
  
• French Bread
  

Monday

• Pulled Chicken Sandwiches on homemade buns
  
• Green salad
  

Tuesday

• Due to poor planning, we ate a Little Caesar's pizza (ahem)
  

Wednesday

• Italian Panini with tomato, chicken, and basil filling
  

Thursday

• Shrimp Veiness
  
• Fruit Salad
  
• French bread
  

Friday

• Grilled Pizza
  

Food Waste Photo

 

Did you notice I didn't call it a weekly food waste photo?? I don't seem to be doing any better at keeping up with this than with my menu plans!

Since I was a little tardy with the fridge cleaning, this represents more than a week's worth of wastage. I threw away a bag of baby carrots(I have no idea why these went moldy so fast...they're not that old!), a couple of cherries(which is very sad considering how expensive they are!!), two bananas that I should have frozen, a small bowl of ravioli, a little bit of grilled chicken which was leftover from when I made wraps, and finally some ranch dressing. I wanted some to use when I made wraps and didn't have any, so I tried a recipe off the internet and it was waaay too heavy on the garlic(plus I'd left it in the fridge with no lid for a week and it had developed a nasty thick dried layer on top...appetizing, huh?).

This may seem counter-intuitive, but I think that since I'm having trouble cleaning the fridge once a week, I'm going to do it twice a week. My hypothesis is that I put it off because it's a large job after a week, so if I do it more often I'll be less likely to put it off. I'm also hoping that doing it this way will keep me more up to speed on what's in my fridge which will in turn help me waste less food.

Another leftover triumph

Nine times out of ten when I make tacos, I let the leftover meat go bad. I think it's just laziness on my part...it's sort of a pain to reheat the meat and get all the taco fixings out again to make just one taco. So, I either let it go bad in the fridge, or I put it in the freezer(with good intentions of thawing it and eating it later!) and let it get freezer burnt.

Well, this week I made tacos, and I am proud to say that I didn't throw away one bit of the meat. I decided to make a taco salad with it to eat for lunch and it was actually pretty tasty. I had some iceberg lettuce that was on its last leg, so I cut that up and topped it with the meat, some cheese, and some sour cream. It was maybe not the healthiest lunch ever, but it saved the lettuce and the taco meat from the trash. And, I drank a yogurt smoothie with it, so that redeemed it a bit. =P I still had some left, so last night we had sort of a clean the fridge/freezer night...I had another taco salad, the kids had spaghetti(needed to use some tomato sauce), and the husband had ravioli(which I needed to use up before it got freezer burnt).

I did still manage to waste some food, though. I don't have a picture yet, because I haven't cleaned out my fridge yet(my office is looking fantastic, though! =P). Hopefully tomorrow I will get to that. Or maybe tonight if I am feeling super energetic.