I am not going to lie to you, folks, the second two weeks of our journey to less food waste did not go quite as well as the first two weeks…
Jan 18: In my valiant attempt to not waste anything from our Bountiful Basket, I made sautéed zucchini and baked hash browns with a side of patty melt for supper.
Our older kids are notorious for sneaking snacks throughout the day and then not eating meals. In addition to cracking down on their snack-sneaking ways, we have been paying more attention to the portion sizes of the foods we serve them. For example, I split a patty melt and a baked hash brown between the two of them and gave them a small spoon of zucchini. And they both cleaned their plates.
Jan 20: Homemade, frozen, restaurant – it matters not, we love pizza and eat a lot of it. We had a couple of friends over for a sort of “thanks in advance” supper and some laughs, so I made four homemade pizzas – two hamburger and pepperoni and two Philly steak. If you are a Friends fan, this is also what I refer to as two “Joey Specials”.
Jan 21: On account of the busy-ness of the day, the amount of leftover pizza we had was truly a blessing. I ate leftovers for lunch while Tom and the kids went on a parts run. And we all had leftover pizza for supper.
Jan 23: As you may or may not know, we spent the weekend in the big city for a friend’s wedding. But we did not let the fact that we were away from home and eating out a lot deter us from our goal of reducing food waste. We made the kids clean up their breakfast plates from the hotel and limited their snacking throughout the day. And it paid off because they cleaned up their supper that they got to choose from the kids buffet (great idea by the way!) at the wedding reception.
Jan 24: Since our car was in the shop and we weren’t able to hit the road home, we spent the day with My Sheila and her family. We had lunch at Runza, where I always order on the lighter side and choose meals for the kids that I like – just in case I have to clean it up. This time there was and ice cream pay-off if they finished their lunch, so they devoured their chicken strips and hamburger. I did, however, get to finish one twist cone – my favie.
Jan 26: After arriving home from our wedding weekend trip a couple of days late, I decided it was high-time I clean out the refrigerator and treat our chickens to the resulting scraps. And oh my, did we have some scraps…
Chicken scraps and a basket full of eggs.
The chickens got to enjoy a smorgasbord that included three avocado, two baked hash brown patties, one head of living butter lettuce, one carrot, leftover sautéed zucchini, and half of an apple pie that I made before Christmas. Seriously – who does that?!?! Who bakes a homemade apple pie and then doesn’t eat it?
I could sit here and justify all of this waste based on the fact that it fed our hens and our hens provide us with eggs, but I won’t. It was a fail, and incentive to do better.
Jan 27: There was some leftover marinara from when I made the two “Joey Specials”, or the four pizzas for the non-Friends fans, that I used to make spaghetti for supper.
Jan 28: So remember that really good rainbow bean soup I referred to in the introduction of this series? Well, the spaghetti sauce met with the same fate. What makes it sting a little more is that we remembered to put the leftover pasta in the refrigerator… More incentive to do better.
Hash brown leftover-makeover
Jan 29: A couple of nights back I made meat and potato burritos, using peppers from our Bountiful Basket in the hash browns that were the potato part of the burritos. The peppers were a little hotter than I thought, so I did not use all that I had cut up. Those went into the hash browns I made for lunch today, plus some pork sausage that the neighbor made and a little onion. We topped the whole thing off with eggs over-easy and it was leftover-makeover for the delicious win.
Over the past two weeks we’ve had some wins and fails, but we are not discouraged. I am excited to continue sharing this journey with you, so stay tuned next time for more leftover-makeovers, project freezer clean-up, and how we’ve adjusted our food storage system to create less waste.
In the meantime, I would love to hear some of your favorite leftover-makeover recipes – to share, simply leave them in the comments or shoot me a message using the Contact Me page.
Click here if you’ve missed out on any of the posts in this series.
Hello! I’m Terryn – the wife, mother, food safety enthusiast, Stormy Kromer fanatic who has slightly (okay, a lot) random tendencies, dabbles in photography, and shares (maybe a little too much) here at FFB.