Food, Glorious Food!

Whether it’s my nature, my nurture, or a little of both, I’m someone who can’t stand to waste food. I’d go nuts if I worked where throwing out food was a regular part of the routine. While I understand the reasoning, it still drives me crazy when health regulations restrict restaurants or grocers from giving unsold food to homeless shelters or soup kitchens.

So when milk goes bad, muffins get baked. When bananas turn black, into the freezer they go until nine bananas accumulate, enough for three loaves of banana bread. When vegetables begin to wilt, they’re thrown into the soup pot. Mold can be scraped off a block of cheese. Shred what’s left and throw it on pizza. (If you find that disgusting, remember cheese is basically mold to begin with.) Bread crusts get turned into crumbs for meatloaf. Lunch in our home is generally an odd assortment of reheated leftovers.

I suspect this comes from being raised by people who lived through the Great Depression. I cheered when I heard that food manufacturers are changing their labeling practices because too many consumers toss out food unnecessarily after interpreting the “Best Before” date as the “You’ll die if this touches your lips after” date.

When I heard a younger person talking about tossing stuff from her fridge into the garbage every week, I realized not everyone received the skills to maximize their food purchases. With recent soaring prices, a surge of desire for this knowledge is becoming apparent.

So, I’d like to do my part. Here are three tips and two recipes to help minimize food waste.

Tip 1: Plan your meals for the week and make a list of what you’ll need before you shop. Stick to the list and the plan.

Tip 2: Shop once a week or less. If you’ve run out of something, make do. You’ll develop better planning habits if you refuse to enter a grocery store more than once a week.

Tip 3: If you have a freezer, use a small magnetic whiteboard on the door to keep track of what’s inside. Add and delete items from the list every time you add or remove something from the freezer.

Recipe 1: Muffins
1 cup oats
1 cup sour milk
1 cup flour
1 tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cinnamon (optional)
½ tsp. salt
¾ cup sugar
1 beaten egg
¼ cup melted margarine or butter (or use half applesauce)
1 cup fruit (blueberries, saskatoons, raisins, or chopped apples work well)

Combine oats and milk in small bowl, let stand. Combine flour, baking powder, soda, salt, cinnamon, and sugar in large bowl. Stir well. Add egg and butter/applesauce to oat mixture. Mix well. Add wet all at once to dry. Stir just enough to moisten. Gently fold in fruit. Fill well-greased muffin cups ¾ full. Bake at 400 F about 15 minutes. Makes 12.

Recipe 2: Soup Stock
Leftover bones from a roast chicken or other meat make great soup stock, but you can make an excellent stock from only vegetables, too. In a large pot, place a peeled and quartered onion, two or three stalks of celery with leaves, a washed and cut-up carrot, 6 peppercorns and a tsp. of salt. The beauty of this is, you can toss in bits of any vegetables past their prime. Broccoli, cabbage, potatoes, etc. Fill the pot with water, bring to a boil, then simmer for one to three hours. Strain and use the stock in any soup recipe. Use it right away or freeze it. 

If you’re a bit of a homesteader, you’ll feed those drained vegetables to the chickens, pigs, or compost pile. But hey, even if you have none of those, you can toss them out with the satisfaction of knowing you’ve gleaned more nutrition out of them before they hit your trash can, and you’ve stretched your food budget as well.