Filed under: Food
Any time you have food that goes into the trash you are throwing away money and taking up landfill space, even if only for a short time. So, how can you make sure you have the least amount of food waste?
- Compost - if you don’t have chickens or other animals that might eat up things like potato peels, make good use of a compost pile. We do a lot of cooking at our house and once we started composting we were able to reduce our weekly trash by at least a bag or two.
- Get creative - if you’re cooking something large like a pot roast and worried you won’t get all the leftovers eaten up, make a plan for them. You can eat pot roast the first night, beef stew another night, and beef pot pies another night. Same basic ingredients, and it’s using up that roast but you feel like you are eating a whole new creation so it doesn’t get boring. Last week I cooked a 10.5 pound ham and we ate bits and pieces of it for an entire week but since i was creative with it, it didn’t get boring. We had ham and bean soup, red beans and rice with ham, scalloped potatoes with ham, ham Cesar salads, ham sandwiches, you get the idea.
- Pass it on - if you have a bounty that you know won’t get used up due to gifts, fantastic bargains, garden surplus, etc. pass some of it on to someone who will use it. I always do this with perishables before a vacation if they don’t get used up. But what about passing on some extra vegetables to a neighbor instead of letting them go to waste and then hitting the compost pile?
- Freeze it - ripe bananas can be frozen and used later for breads, muffins or even smoothies. Many fruit and vegetables can be blanched and frozen for later use. Portion sizes of leftovers can be frozen and eaten later. Ripe fruit or extra fruit juices can be blended and made into popsicles.
Creating Less Food Waste originally appeared on Green Daily on Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:02:00 EST 0. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
