A week of food-waste fighting, in pictures

Every week, I post a picture of the food that has gone bad over the last seven days. Why do I do this? Because in March of 2008, I finally got fed up with the amount of food I was wasting, and I thought that showing my waste to other people would motivate me to use up my food instead of wasting it. Because this often embarrassing practice was so helpful for me, I invited other bloggers to join me in posting their food waste photos, and Food Waste Friday was born.

We’ll just get the bad news over with first, mmkay?

I’m not quite sure how this happened, but the end of a loaf of whole wheat sandwich bread went kaput.

You know how I think having homemade bread around all the time makes you less likely to eat it with abandon? Well, I suppose this is an example of that.

Ok! On to better and brighter things.

As you know, we went berry picking this week.   When we got home, I sorted through our berries and picked out the ones with soft spots or holes and trimmed them up.   We ate quite a few of those as-is, and I also froze some.

And you already know I used some veeeeery ripe bananas

to make banana chocolate chip muffins.

I got my every-other-week produce box this week, and on the day it arrived, I adjusted my dinner plans to include corn, blueberries, and lettuce from the box (plus strawberries from our picking trip).

The chicken is Cook’s Illustrated’s Parmesan Crusted Chicken, and as I was cooking the chicken, I realized I had more pieces than we’d eat in one dinner. So I refrigerated a few, uncooked, and made them for lunch the next day.

That felt a lot less like leftovers!

I needed three egg whites to make the chicken, so I ended up with three yolks.

(Note the counters which are currently stained with strawberry juice!)

So when I made some sweet rolls, I just threw them in in place of a single egg (yeast dough is pretty forgiving like that.)

One day this week, we were at the pool all afternoon.   I had no dinner planned (the horror!) and we got home kind of late.

This is sort of a recipe for takeout (I am very not awesome at coming up with meals on the fly.), but I rummaged through the freezer and found some fish, shrimp, and English muffins, and cobbled together a dinner of sorts, with the addition of green beans from my produce delivery box).

So, I didn’t get takeout and I used up some random stuff from my freezer.   Yay!

If you follow me on instagram,  you know I froze some bananas earlier in the week.

(What?   You don’t follow me on Instagram?   I’m a picture-posting fool on there, and I regularly share food waste tidbits. Come join the party!)

I made ’em into strawberry banana “ice cream”, using some of the strawberries I froze earlier.

It’s just strawberries, bananas, heavy cream (nom nom. I love me some heavy cream.), and a bit of vanilla, and I’m pretty sure it’s the tastiest way ever to avoid food waste.   😉

I think this might be the most picture-iffic Food Waste Friday post ever. I apologize to any of you who are still reading me on dial-up internet. 😉