| Food Waste Friday: The Good, The Bad, and the Beautiful Posted: 31 May 2012 07:01 PM PDT  One of my biggest pet peeves is throwing away food. I could kick myself every time I dump food down the drain or in the trash: it’s just a complete and total waste! And I hate waste. Which is why I am so thrilled to link up to The Frugal Girl on her weekly feature where she posts a picture of all the food she had to throw away for the week, and invites other bloggers to do the same. The idea is to feel some accountability – who wants to admit they threw away all that money to the whole world? – to help you avoid throwing away food in the future. Before I get to The Bad, let me boast on myself a little and tell you all The Good things I saved (like the good girl I am!): - My sisters brought a huge watermelon to our Memorial Day dinner… while I was in the process of cutting up our little personal size watermelon. Since they only wanted to take a portion of it home, we happily agreed to keep the rest of it. Consequently, we ate watermelon at every meal for the next 3 days straight. But we like watermelon, so it’s all good.
- My sisters also brought some store-bought bread (wow, something we rarely see around here!) with them, and once again did not desire to bring it back home with them. We used some for sandwiches, but still had almost a whole loaf left over. My DH was asked to bring in a dish to share for a breakfast potluck at work, and his co-workers suggested fruit salad. Well, I like fruit salad, but making fruit salad would have required me to go out and buy more fruit. Which would waste both time and money. So instead, I used the rest of that loaf of bread, plus a dozen eggs (don’t worry; we still had plenty of eggs left), plus some leftover cooked sausage I had stashed away in the freezer, and made a delicious egg strata.
- I bought a bunch of green onions at the farmers’ market, and instead of leaving them around to wither away and die like I have been known to do (ahem), I promptly chopped up the green parts and put them in the freezer, then placed the bulbs in a cup of water to grow some more. Dude, I am so patting myself on the back right now. What a good girl I am!!
But then there’s The Bad. So in the picture above, you see what I threw away this week: - a serving of soup (You would think that I would have learned by now that if they didn’t like it the first time around, they ain’t gonna love it the second time!) from the freezer
- almost an entire package (gasp!) of celery
- a budding sweet potato
- a rotting white potato
- a frozen dish of pasta sauce made from avocado (once again, not a big hit on the first go-round)
- freezer-burnt chopped peppers
Eek. So not feeling the good girl vibes anymore. But then there’s the redeeming factor: The Beautiful. We went strawberry picking last weekend and picked 20 pounds of strawberries! Read my post here about what I did with all those beautiful little strawberries before they went bad. Those who plan menus generally tend to waste less food. Not into menu planning? You might want to read Stephanie Langford’s eBook, “Plan It, Don’t Panic” for inspiration. Right now, it’s on sale 25% off with the code CHALLENGE25, making it only $3.74. Or you can just go for a bundle of all 3 of her books at 50% off (that’s only $19!) with the code BUNDLE50! Sharing at Frugal Days, Sustainable Ways Thank you for subscribing to Quick and Easy Cheap and Healthy! Here's your free copy of Spring Into Smoothies All Summer Long. Enjoy!  |
| What To Do With 20 Pounds of Strawberries! Posted: 31 May 2012 06:08 PM PDT 
It’s strawberry season, y’all! Time to go find a pick-your-own farm near you and get busy! The farm we go to - like many PYO farms, I imagine – offers a cheaper price per pound if you buy more than a certain amount. In the case of strawberries, that’s 20 pounds. So naturally, I had to pick 20+ pounds of strawberries! Why pay $2.59 a pound when I can pay $2.09? And as much as The Guys and I love strawberries, there’s no way we could plow through 20 pounds of them before they went bad. After all, strawberries start to deteriorate almost as soon as you’ve picked them off the plant, so they have to be eaten rather quickly. That was fine with me, though. At any rate, my entire purpose in picking strawberries was to preserve them so we could enjoy them for the 10 months of the year when they are not in season, so 20 pounds was perfect for me! So what did I do with all those berries? I spent a decent portion of the weekend “putting them up” as the grandmas would say, and this is what I did: - I froze probably about 10 pounds of strawberries following these directions for freezing berries. I sliced about half of them and just packed them into freezer bags without bothering to flash freeze them. The rest I left whole and those I did flash freeze. My plan is to see which method I prefer as I use them throughout the rest of the year. (My opinion at the moment is that slicing them takes up a lot less space, but might render them less accessible.)
- I dehydrated about a pound of strawberries, which wasn’t much, especially because they shrink considerably as they dry! To dehydrate, I sliced each strawberry into about 3 slices and laid them on a dehydrator tray. Once I set it going, the drying process took probably 4-6 hours. I’m not 100% sure because I got busy doing other things and going places and I don’t really know for sure how long it took. I do know that we all left the house for the evening, so I turned off the dehydrator and then forgot to turn it back on. Ugh! I had to throw out the strawberries that hadn’t dehydrated completely, which thankfully was not too many. Next time around, I will definitely dry more strawberries… and I won’t run off, leaving them unattended, either!
- I also made some jam. I experimented this year with jam made from home-made pectin. That’s another post for another day. I also made two batches of jam using Pomona’s pectin, one which I froze, and one which I canned.
- I made smoothies for breakfast one morning using the Straw-nana Berry Smoothie recipe from Spring Into Smoothies (Pssst! Spring Into Smoothies is available FREE to all my subscribers!)
- I gave away some of the strawberries. What good is all that bounty if you don’t give some away?
- I made this delicious Sour Cream Strawberry Ice Cream. Oh. My. It was sooooo gooooood. I didn’t have quite enough sour cream, so I used part plain yogurt, and wow! The most delicious ice cream ever! I also only used half a cup of (unrefined) sugar, and it was perfectly sweet. (Of course, the berries were picked ripe, so they were nice and sweet already.)
And that, my friends, is what you do with twenty pounds of strawberries! What would you do with twenty pounds of strawberries? Thank you for subscribing to Quick and Easy Cheap and Healthy! Here's your free copy of Spring Into Smoothies All Summer Long. Enjoy!  |
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