Food waste photo-9.12

I wasted two things this week. In the bag are some beans from my mom’s garden. She has graciously assured me that these do not need to count towards my food waste total, since they can be sent back to the dirt from whence they came. But, I’m harder on myself than my mom is, and I’m counting them!

Then there is a partial container of sour cream. I’m sort of stumped on this one. I didn’t buy it that long ago, and it’s been sitting in a nice cold part of my fridge. I just don’t know how it went bad. But bad it is…the odor is pretty sickening.

The bummer is, I was going to use it to make some dip so we could eat up the last bit of celery that I have. Instead, I decided to try freezing the celery in the hope of using it next time I stuff a chicken. I’ll let you know how that goes…hopefully it won’t be too mushy!

So, it wasn’t an no-waste week, but I’m still pretty happy with how this week went. My fridge, which is often filled to overflowing, now looks like this:

There’s really nothing in there that will go bad while we’re gone(the milk will be eaten for breakfast tomorrow before we leave, the buttermilk hasn’t been opened yet, and the unopened jars of yogurt will keep), and that’s the result of some very careful eating this week. In times past, I’ve tried to leave with a clean fridge, but those fridge cleanings usually found me throwing many container’s worth of leftovers away. This time I’ve managed to clean it while throwing away only the sour cream and beans(the beans will be composted, so the sour cream is the only thing that will actually hit the garbage)…that’s an encouraging sign of progress in my life!

A nice bonus of having a completely cleaned out fridge is that when I get back from vacation, it will be sort of like starting with a clean slate. Maybe another no-waste week is in the near future…