With my current work schedule, gone multiple days in a row for most of the day, and often not eating or cooking at home during that time, I end up wasting food, especially fresh fruit and vegetables. I can no longer afford to, both financially and mentally. The constant throwing out or composting of vegetables/fruits and products I bought with a goal in mind is a cycle that leaves me feeling unfulfilled and wasteful. In order to hold myself accountable for this, I am going to write up a post weekly that explains what I do with foods I have that are on the verge of getting thrown out or composted. This hopefully will also help anyone else stuck in the cycle of food waste, and give ideas for different ways to use things. Feel free to comment and be part of it, I want to learn!
Food to use this week:
- Apples - Applesauce - Bananas - Blueberries - Basil - Red Cabbage -
- Cherry Tomatoes - Kale - Lobster Mushrooms - Pears - Potatoes -
Monday I started getting on the food preparation grind, but during making a soup, I sliced half of the nail of my left pointer finger and I passed out. Soup turned out good, my second time making this soup and it has become me and Kevin's favorite. It has potatoes, kale, and sausage in it. I also end up using the potato skin peels, I wash them, roughly chop them (that's how I lost part of a nail), well season and oil them, and broil them in the oven for about 7 minutes or less. They're great to go on top of the soup at the end. I took a few hours to rest, shower, and be gentle to my finger. Then I got back to it.
I felt like the blueberries were most important to get started on. I picked them more than a month ago. They held up very well in the fridge. I had a bag and a half left and there were about 30 mushy blueberries but other than that they got washed and put in the dehydrater. At the same time I blended together apple sauce and blueberries and trayed it, putting it in my oven on the dehyrater setting. This goes in rounds until I am out of blueberries.
I bought a large container of basil thinking I would use it that same day. It has been about a week now, and the basil is starting to brown on some leaves, so I need to act fast. I do have some garlic, and some nuts, so a pesto could work. I don't have any cheese though, and I sort of feel like that is essential. But on second thought, Nutritional yeast! Which I happen to love, and so does Kevin. So I made pesto using basil, olive oil, salt, pumpkin seeds, nutritional yeast, garlic, and crushed red pepper.
After going through my basil, I also went through my cherry tomatoes. One had molded and two were mushy, all the others got halved and put in the dehyrater. Not totally sure what I will do with them after that. I made a tomato powder before, which was great, so probably that.
Tuesday I spent the day resting, the cold passed on from Kevin was starting to hit me. I finished dehydrating the blueberries, and put the dried cherry tomatoes in olive oil with some salt to theroretically turn them into sun dried tomatoes. I don't know if this will work but I suppose we will see.
Wednesday is my last day before the work weekend and I am feeling sick, not great so I am mostly just resting. There were some suprise cherry bomb peppers in a package or hot peppers I got. I cut them up thinly and started them in the dehydrater with the rest of my blueberries. I also started some fruit leather in the oven, I used the rest of the applesauce and two small peaches I had. I made two trays with one peach each, sooo yummy!
By the time I got around to it the red cabbage was pretty sad, it had been chopped up about 3 days ago and put in the fridge, so I decided my worms would really like it. The banana's also felt like something I couldn't tackle with all of my ailments this week, so I peeled them all, gave the peels to my worms, and put the bananas in a container and froze them to use next week. This is the recipe I will most likely make next week when I have some time and energy to bake.
As far as everything else on my list I didn't get to (Apples, Pears and Lobster Mushrooms), Kevin and I will be enjoying some of the mushrooms with dinner tonight, and the apples and pears can keep until next week in the fridge. If there are extra mushrooms I will either dry or blanch and freeze them. I will be so much better next week, this cut, and this cold both did me quite dirty.
Thanks for reading, Lillian☘︎
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