I just love The Frugal Girl blog. Really - just love!
Each week (well - most weeks) she blogs about her food waste, a kind of public declaration, aimed to reduce her own food waste. And she invites the rest of us to join her!
So, I have had two pretty disastrous weeks in a row (here and here), and I know that on first glance this week won't look much better.
Are you familiar with the saying "you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs"? Well, this week is my attempt to make things a whole lot better, but it had to get worse first!
I've been really inspired by seeing some of the pictures of the contents of people's beautifully organized and sparse refrigerators on other blogs for Food Waste Friday. So inspired that I actually cleaned out my fridge ... and found a bunch of really expired stuff. And some stuff that was just wasted, too. But I think that the combination of actually knowing (and seeing) what is in my fridge, and better menu/shopping plans, will be just the ticket.
(So you have to know, before you see the picture of the inside of my fridge, that My Good Man is the King of Condiments (really! - that is one of my nicknames for him!) so the fridge still has a lot of his sauces and whatnot in it).
Not too shabby! Let's see if it looks this good in another week!!
(I'm realizing that I'm not very good at remembering to take before pictures, only after ones, although I'm not sure you would really want to see the inside of my former, disorganized fridge).
And now for the not so good stuff ... the waste :-(
A jar of mincemeat from at least the previous decade, moldy pasta sauce and butternut squash soup, hard sauce (for Xmas Puddings!) and a half used sachet of yeast all bit the dust. I was really upset though about the breadsticks. They were made by me from left over pizza dough, and I was really pleased that I had found a great way to utilize the leftover dough. So I baked them, and popped them in the freezer ... and when I took them out to accompany a meal the other day, they were as hard as rocks. So now they're breadcrumbs in the freezer (thanks for the tip, SimplyBurbs readers !) but still it made me sad.
Mashed potatoes pulled from the freezer for a particular meal, then our plans changed and we didn't eat them, then they got pushed to the back of the fridge and forgotten, until they were all slimy and yucky. I tried to reuse these in something like potato bread, but they were too far gone. And these were potatoes we dug up ourselves from our CSA Farm, too.
Very old jar of fruit spread, jar of marmalade sauce (ditto, very old), herbal tinctures (about a decade past their best before date) and a plum pudding from a previous decade all saw the trash can too.
So, this looks bad, really bad. But actually the only real food waste from this week was the pasta sauce, soup and mashed potatoes; the rest is the result of a disorganized fridge.
How was your Food Waste this week? Feel free to share; I'd love to hear from you!
