Food Waste Friday: Dessert

My food waste this week:

1/3 of a pan of peanut butter dessert. I feel kinda bad about wasting this, but I would feel worse if I sat down and ate it all. So.... Lesser of two guilts. Also, 2 cups of White Chicken Chili (sans chicken). Gary doesn't like chicken in his chicken chili, so this is a super cheap no-prep dish that I always have the ingredients for. Yay! The biggest problem is that I always try to add dairy (this time it was sour cream) and it ALWAYS curdles. Not like "ew, I can't eat this" curdle, just a general "this stuff won't mix in, oh duh, because its curdled" curdle. Rats. 

Waste-O-Meter

$1.00 - peanut butter dessert

$0.25? - Soup

+____

$1.25 total waste

Clearly my best week! I'm thrilled to say I bought a head of lettuce and ate it before it went bad this week! Not just any lettuce either, hydroponic butter lettuce. I know. Amazing. I also bought a squash and I don't know what I'm going to do with it. I'm thinking slice it into chips, bread it, and fry it. Yummy!

I also have a bag of spinach and some cooked chicken that i need to use up!

Also, an update on Get Real, we did awesome! My goal was to eat all REAL good while we were at home this week and we did with the exception if one item, fresh made sushi from Harris Teeter. It went well with our hydroponic butter lettuce salad. One thing I LOVED about this challenger was eating homemade bread all week! 

My breakfast almost every morning consisted of fried eggs, buttered (homemade!) toast and homemade peach jam. (And coffee, of course..) Real food is so great!

Food Waste Friday (a bit late!)

This is my waste this week. Three wrinkly apples, half a cantaloupe, some moldy carrots, and about a quart of homemade yogurt. 

The apples came from a bag that was about $5/10 apples. They been in the fridge for, like.... 6 weeks. The cantaloupe was $3.50, and the carrots.... Probably $2? And this is about a 5th if a bag. I'm chalking the yogurt up to a learning curve. It was my first time making it and it turned out a bit soft. I made A gallon, though, and used most of it! 

This is some kombucha that has been sitting into fridge for about 2 months. My hubby discovered it and opened the bottle (it was REALLY bubbly!) and we remembered "This stuff is delicious!!" And quickly finished the bottle. So we have another batch fermenting now!

$1.50 - apples

$1.75 - cantaloupe 

$0.80 - carrots 

$1.10? - yogurt

+_____

$5.15 wasted this week. 

I'm bummed that I let this much produce go bad. 

I cleaned out my fridge, pantry, and cabinets this week, so next week should be great!!

Food Waste Friday

I think this week was better than last week. 

This week I let a cucumber mold (okay, it's been about 3 weeks honestly...), we lost a half package of Greek yogurt (I think Gary started it and didnt finish it), about 1/4 of a bottle of orange juice, and (heartbreakingly) about 2 cups of husband-made hummus. 

$0.75 - 1/4 bottle OJ 

$1.00 - Greek yogurt

$0.50 - Cucumber 

$2.00 - hummus (that's a guess...)

+____

$4.25 - grand total of waste. Added to last week's total, that puts me at about $25 of wasted food this month. 

The orange juice separated. Two reasons: 1. I let it sit out for a day. 2. It's about 5 weeks old. Gross! The hummus (clearly) molded. I let this happen because the only thing I eat hummus with is chips. I've got to work on that! Come to think of it, that cucumber would have been really yummy with the hummus. Rats!

I focused this week on using up perishable things in my fridge and purposely planned my meals around them. We had chicken and pasta  with sautéed mushrooms and onions one day and I knew I still had half an onion sitting in the fridge, so the next day we had fajitas (and added mushrooms, which are very unfajita-ey) so that I could use up the rest of my produce! I also found an almost gone lime lurking in the fridge so I tossed that into the fajitas while they cooked to add some delicious flavor. Yum! And then I used up all my lemons on lemonade to go with the meal, but some of that is still in the fridge. I'm gonna get on it fast so I don't have to report it to you next week!

I took another anti food waste measure this week..... Bone broth!

After lunch Sunday I had a chicken carcass and some leftover snap peas. I put all of that into my crockpot, along with some vinegar, peppercorns, and a gallon of water and let it sit for over two days on low and now I have some rich delicious bone broth! 

I'm not sure if I should count the leftover cooked bones as food waste. What do you think? How did you do this week?

Food Waste Friday

In order to get my food waste under control, I'm going to start posting pictures of it here for you all to see and give me a hard time about. I got this idea from my very favorite blogger "The Frugal Girl" so here goes. 

This is breast milk (I know, I hate me too), Moravian chicken pie, and formerly frozen yogurt that I made. 

This is a totally untouched bag of lettuce, a half eaten container of baby spinach, and the two peaches actual symbolize, like... 6 peaches. I already threw the others away before I decided to do this. Also, I wasted a tomato which isn't pictured. 

1 oz. breast milk - $5 (if I were buying it. No lie.)

1/4 chicken pie - $3.25

Frozen Yogurt - $1.50

Spring Mix - $2.88

1/2 container of spinach - $2.50

Peaches - $4

Tomato - $1.50

+_______________

$20.63 in the trash.

Just. This. Week.