Blog for all health-conscious: Quick and Easy Cheap and Healthy It’s Peach Season! {Food Waste Friday}

Friday, 29 June 2012

Quick and Easy Cheap and Healthy It’s Peach Season! {Food Waste Friday}

Link to Quick and Easy Cheap and Healthy

Posted: 28 Jun 2012 07:35 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.

So in the picture above, you see what I threw away this week:

about half a cup of homemade rice milk
about 1/4 cup of rice
1 piece of fish

I learned something this week: I need to make 2 cups of rice milk at a time instead of 4 cups. Four cups generally go bad before I get around to using them, but I’d definitely use up 2 cups within a few days. I use rice milk in all cooking and baking for My Certain Little Someone.

I am not exactly sure why I had only 1/4 cup of cooked rice left over… it came from a container of rice that had actually been frozen, being extras cooked on purpose for that very reason. I should have just thrown that last 1/4 cup into the blender when I made the rice milk. But then again, it would have been wasted anyway, so whatever. Odds and ends are the hardest to use up!

And then there was that lonely piece of fish that nobody wanted to eat 3 days after the fact. Once again, this fishy little food remnant came from a container of leftovers that had intentionally been frozen. We ate up his companions, but alas. One little fishy still remained.

What this picture does not show is the carnage left over from my rampage through the snack cupboard. I am slowly organizing all my kitchen cabinets as I have some spare time (ha!), and this week, I hit on the snack cupboard. Goodness gracious, there were some ancient snacks in there, like half-licked lollipops and such. I tossed them all! But it was all junk to begin with, so I don’t really regret the loss. Too much.

But on a happier note… it’s peach season! I loooovvveee peach season. I look forward to it almost as much as strawberry season. Last week at the farmers’ market, I was able to pick up a peck of seconds peaches for $3.50! Woot! And then this week, they had baskets of “small” peaches for $3 less than the regular price, making them only $5. Sheesh, I don’t care how small my peaches are! Especially if they cost less!

So we are eating a lot of peaches around here. (Not that we mind.) If you find yourself with an overabundance of peaches (and I hope you do!), here are some suggestions for enjoying them:

Can them. Canning is absolutely my favorite way to preserve peaches because it keeps their color and texture (mostly) intact. That’s kinda hard to do. Dehydrating and freezing peaches can really turn them brownish blackish, which is just not pretty. And thankfully, canning peaches is super easy, as I explain in my eBook, Your Grocery Budget Toolbox. One of the easiest things to can, in fact! I’ve already canned one quart jar this year, and I hope to can quite a few more.
I have frozen peaches before. And they look fine… until you thaw them. Then they turn into a pile of brownish blackish mush. Ick. Apparently a little splash of lemon juice before freezing can help with that, but I haven’t tried it.
Ginger Peach Shortcakes are an excellent use for peaches. Even better than strawberry shortcake (and I can’t believe I’m saying that!).
Peach Sorbet is the bomb. Nothing beats the smooth and creamy texture. And the flavor. I am trying to figure out how I can squeeze my ice cream maker into the freezer because I seriously want to make this ice cream tomorrow!
I always make a couple batches of peach jam during peach season. It’s very much like strawberry jam in the method, although the ingredient amounts might vary slightly.
There’s apple crisp, there’s strawberry crisp, and then there’s peach crisp. In a league of its own. Follow this method – 1-2-3- Fruit Crisp! - for any fruit you have on hand.
Peach fruit leather is also quite delicious, one of my favorite flavors of fruit leather, in fact. There are lots of tutorials on the web, you can try this one: Weelicious Peach Fruit Leather.