Each week since March 2008, in order to motivate her to waste less food, Kristen The Frugal Girl, has posted a picture of any food that has gone bad over the last seven days. She found this embarrassing practice so helpful, to her, that she invited other bloggers to post their own photos, and Food Waste Friday was born.
I started participating in October 2010 and have found, 4-years on, the amount of food I waste is minimal. Every Friday, as part of my No Waste Tastes Great routine, I account for all my potential food waste as well as confessing to any items that I failed to save.
Kristen kindly asked me to host Food Waste Friday, alternate weeks and her initial invite for everyone to join in is cordially extended here!
It’s the first Friday in a while I have actually attempted my No Waste Tastes Great routine.
Still immobile, I’m starting to bore of my own excuses as to what I can and can’t do. Time to pull myself up by the bootstraps and get stuck in.
After all my fridge is a good indication of how life is going for me.
Today’s isn’t so bad. No waste to speak off, and the fridge is pretty minimal I’m not expecting any food waste to follow in the next couple of days.
I’m shopping so little (and we’re living off ready-made pizza – but that’s a whole other blog post) that the circumstances do not generate excessive food waste.
Living day-to-day and eating the same means that pretty much what we need to consume is purchased. I know this is a great food waste reduction tactic. But meals are pretty boring.
Apple asked yesterday what am I missing most. Cooking. That’s what I am missing most. I do struggle with dishing up ready-made meals and other convenience foods. Once in a while is okay, but it’s getting a regular occurrence.
I’m thinking I need to get into the salad groove…
Any suggestions on really easy to make one-handed dishes anyone?
Those of you who participate in Food Waste Friday can now grab a fancy-schmancy button to perk up your posts. If you copy and paste the following code into your Food Waste Friday post, this little graphic will appear.”
If you blog on WordPress, just make sure you’re in html mode when you copy and paste the code, or it won’t work
I hope you’re continuing to recover. It must be very frustrating to not being able to cook and clean to your heart’s content (although, personally, I’d definitely see those as an enforced vacation!) but there is light at the end of the tunnel and you’ll be back on your feet sooner than you were last week. Hang in there!
I posted my Food Waste Friday post on my blog. We did pretty well this week and I’m excited that I was able to “save” several items too instead of throwing them away. I even inserted a “Leftovers Night” in my weekly menu and if we don’t have any, I’ll just make a quick omelet or something. The most exciting part of the week was that I finally got around to making an inventory of what is in my freezer and spent only half of the amount I had budgeted for groceries this week ($50 instead of $100). I also have meat for several weeks so I will be working on loosely planning some menus ahead of time to use up those things that have been in the freezer the longest. The least exciting thing that happened is that my Google Calendar Reminder about cleaning my fridge popped up yesterday. I absolutely HATE cleaning my fridge. I don’t know how you enjoy it so much 🙂 But I need to tackle it at some point soon. I do inventory it each week so as to prevent food waste so I don’t think I’ll have any surprises, it’s just a time-consuming hassle to have to get everything out and in again (mine is always full!).
Have a great weekend!
I hope you’re continuing to recover. It must be very frustrating to not being able to cook and clean to your heart’s content (although, personally, I’d definitely see those as an enforced vacation!) but there is light at the end of the tunnel and you’ll be back on your feet sooner than you were last week. Hang in there!
I posted my Food Waste Friday post on my blog. We did pretty well this week and I’m excited that I was able to “save” several items too instead of throwing them away. I even inserted a “Leftovers Night” in my weekly menu and if we don’t have any, I’ll just make a quick omelet or something. The most exciting part of the week was that I finally got around to making an inventory of what is in my freezer and spent only half of the amount I had budgeted for groceries this week ($50 instead of $100). I also have meat for several weeks so I will be working on loosely planning some menus ahead of time to use up those things that have been in the freezer the longest. The least exciting thing that happened is that my Google Calendar Reminder about cleaning my fridge popped up yesterday. I absolutely HATE cleaning my fridge. I don’t know how you enjoy it so much 🙂 But I need to tackle it at some point soon. I do inventory it each week so as to prevent food waste so I don’t think I’ll have any surprises, it’s just a time-consuming hassle to have to get everything out and in again (mine is always full!).
Have a great weekend!
I’m thinking it might be easy to toss ingredients into the slow cooker in the morning – either have your husband or children slice up whatever might need slicing up the night before, combine whatever you can & leave the slow cooker in the insert overnight. Then someone can put the insert into the cooker for you in the morning, and you can turn it on and add whatever still needs to be added (like liquid & seasonings). At least in theory it seems like that would work.
I’m thinking it might be easy to toss ingredients into the slow cooker in the morning – either have your husband or children slice up whatever might need slicing up the night before, combine whatever you can & leave the slow cooker in the insert overnight. Then someone can put the insert into the cooker for you in the morning, and you can turn it on and add whatever still needs to be added (like liquid & seasonings). At least in theory it seems like that would work.
Ummm, what I meant was leave the combined ingredients in the insert in the fridge overnight! Home made is not good if there’s a side of bacteria involved!
Ummm, what I meant was leave the combined ingredients in the insert in the fridge overnight! Home made is not good if there’s a side of bacteria involved!
chicken breasts, salsa in a slow cooker and serve over rice. Maybe someone else has to make the rice?
Roast in the crockpot with some baby carrots and seasonings/marinade sauce or creamed soup if you prefer.
What vegetables can you buy precut? Maybe do something with that?
chicken breasts, salsa in a slow cooker and serve over rice. Maybe someone else has to make the rice?
Roast in the crockpot with some baby carrots and seasonings/marinade sauce or creamed soup if you prefer.
What vegetables can you buy precut? Maybe do something with that?
If you have an electric can opener (or a child who can open the cans for you) there are quite a variety of things from cans that could be had – beans, stew, pasta, tuna. How about sandwiches from deli meat? Or can you get that child – the one who can also open cans 🙂 – to measure the ingredients for pancakes and mix them up? Then you could ladle the batter with one hand and flip them with one hand, too. Actually if you can get to your grocery store, check out the freezer section – in ours you can get family size Shepherd’s Pie, lasagna, all the components of Chinese take-out (rice, egg rolls, sweet & sour chicken, etc.), fish & chips, and so on. The prices are higher than made from scratch, but not as high as take-out. Good luck.
If you have an electric can opener (or a child who can open the cans for you) there are quite a variety of things from cans that could be had – beans, stew, pasta, tuna. How about sandwiches from deli meat? Or can you get that child – the one who can also open cans 🙂 – to measure the ingredients for pancakes and mix them up? Then you could ladle the batter with one hand and flip them with one hand, too. Actually if you can get to your grocery store, check out the freezer section – in ours you can get family size Shepherd’s Pie, lasagna, all the components of Chinese take-out (rice, egg rolls, sweet & sour chicken, etc.), fish & chips, and so on. The prices are higher than made from scratch, but not as high as take-out. Good luck.