leftovers

Waste happens. Own it-Track it-$ave!

March 31, 2021 // by Karen Kos

Greetings, Conscientious Food Consumers!

With spring unfolding here in the mid-Willamette Valley, it’s time for some cleaning, clearing out and… confessing!

We’ve been saying it here for almost a year now: WASTED FOOD = WASTED MONEY. But exactly how much, and why? That’s where our newly-updated D.I.Y. Wasted Food Discovery self-audit form, both in English and Spanish, comes in handy. Try it for a week, and you’ll gain some valuable insights about your household’s food-wasting habits. Behaviors change when we measure them.

You may become inspired to keep doing it on a regular basis — especially after discovering how many grocery dollars you can keep from going down the drain, compost bin or garbage!

OWN IT: Waste happens!

Are you ready to admit that waste happens in your kitchen? It’s not about guilt (although that can be a motivator) — it’s being willing to get real, about how some items in your fridge, freezer and pantry that coulda/shoulda been prepared and eaten ended up wasted instead. Keep reading for a look at what I discovered!

TRACK IT: What got wasted, and why?

With our D.I.Y. Wasted Food Discovery Week form, tallying up the food items that went slimy, spoiled, freezer-burned or forgotten isn’t complicated. You’ll estimate:

The amounts and types of food (it’s okay to “guestimate” your leftover portions/servings, packages or containers — I used cups, ounces and servings for my calculations);
The full or proportional cost for each of those items;
If you have a kitchen scale, measure the weight of wasted items.

WHY IT GOT WASTED: Recall the circumstances or trail of events from the market to your compost pail or trash can for your listed items. This step is your key to change!

You know how it goes… * Ran out of time to cook or cooked too much? * Fridge or freezer over-stuffed? * Too tired to get creative with leftovers? * Marked down/sale items go stale or moldy before you know it? * Bananas turned brown or avocados went bad because they were hanging out on the counter together? (Both emit ethylene gas, which hastens the ripening process.)

ADD IT UP. One week’s wasted $$ x 52 weeks in a year… Prepare to be shocked! (I certainly was.)

Here’s what I learned from my Wasted Food Discovery Week.

Karen Confesses:

Despite blogging and becoming much more vigilant about my own kitchen habits during the past year, I still waste too much!

After a quick review, I discovered that my main problems are inadequate meal prep and managing the Eat First shelf of my fridge and pantry. I also still have issues with wasting avocados and bananas (two of my favorites).

Lessons Learned:

Check avocado(s) for ripeness every day! Use or transfer to fridge once ripe, or within 3 days of purchase.
Buy fewer of the items I’m eating less of (like sugar- and carb-heavy products).
Freeze leftover broth in cubes rather than letting an open carton spoil in the fridge.
Buy fewer bananas and just eat ’em — rather than sticking in freezer smoothie bags.
Check/update my Freezer Inventory every week!

$$$ Wasted:

This is my worst Kitchen Confession of all! Just one week’s waste in my little kitchen represented a potential loss of over $1,000 in one year! That’s a pretty significant chunk — and a HUGE motivation for me to walk the talk, follow my own advice more, and WASTE LESS.

WHAT TO DO. You’ll have some good ideas once you’ve completed your own Wasted Food Discovery Week. Let our Smart Strategies support your improved habits and behaviors for less future waste.

Do you need more meal planning? More prep after your groceries come home?
Do you need better storage? (we also recommend StillTasty.com)
Do you need to inventory what’s in your freezer or pantry?
Do you need more Eat First signs for your leftovers, and are they clearly date-labeled?

Also see our previous Kitchen Confessions for resources and tips you may have missed.

RECIPE CONTEST DEADLINE EXTENSION!

We’re extending the deadline for our Leftovers Recipe Contest an extra week to Sunday, APRIL 11th! What’s your latest hack or culinary inspiration for making use of those random items on the Eat First shelf of your fridge, freezer or pantry?

Here’s of a few of our entries so far: Spaghetti Pie, Mashed Potato Pancakes, Peach Pancake Mix Muffins, Olde Valentine Choco-Coco Bites, and Tuna Cakes with Pickle Cream.

Every recipe is an entry to win a $30 gift card from First Alternative Coop. We’d love to see yours!

Recipe contest for leftovers!

March 11, 2021 // by Karen Kos

Greetings, Conscientious Food Consumers!

It’s time for something different with our Kitchen Confessions. We’re going to talk about recipes — and we’re going to ask for YOURS!

You could win one of three $30 gift cards to First Alternative Co-op!

We haven’t delved much into the topic of recipes before, but they are certainly key to achieving our goal of less wasted food in the home — because:

Recipes can provide both inspiration and how-to.
They can jump start your meal planning and shopping lists.
Whether your cooking approach is conventional or freestyle, recipes can help you feel creative when confronted with that assortment of random food items in your “Eat First” food storage areas.
Recipes can help you use what you have and make the most of those grocery $$ you already spent!

During the past 11 months, we’ve explored why wasted food matters and what you can do about it. We’ve reminded ourselves that 30-40% of edible food in the U.S. ends up in the trash or compost pail instead of being eaten, representing a deplorable amount of wasted water, energy, labor, and money. For an average American family of four, that’s at least $1600/year!

We’ve offered strategies and resources — like our handy “Eat First” signs, in English and Spanish — for helping you, Conscientious Food Consumers, take steps for preventing that waste from happening at home and for stretching your food dollars during this pandemic era. Check out Adventures in Leftovers Land and our previous Kitchen Confessions for topics you may have missed.

Now it’s your turn! We’d love to publicize your unique recipes made from leftovers.

Share those dishes that spring forth from the items in the “Eat First!” areas of your fridge, freezer or pantry before they spoiled, shriveled, freezer-burned or became otherwise inedible. It can be as simple as a short narrative of your list of leftovers and other ingredients you combine into a surprisingly delicious meal, OR a more traditional-style recipe listing of the ingredients and the step-by-step for your unique creation.

Here’s how to submit your recipe — but please keep reading for important details!

HINT: We’re not looking for recipes from your favorite celebrity chef or America’s Test Kitchen! We prefer YOUR home-tested recipes that are a) relatively simple, b) don’t involve much prep time or specialized appliances, and c) DO involve using up leftover food items.

Here’s a few examples:

Stir-fried leftover pasta and veggies
Chunky veggie patty “meatball” soup
Whatever’s-in-the-fridge casserole or burritos
Brown Rice Breakfast Porridge
Dill cream sauce using leftover pickle juice — from the Waste Free Kitchen Handbook, by Dana Gunders (one of my favorite references while writing this blog)

So whether your approach to meal preparation is formal or freestyle, we’re interested in what you come up with. We also want to encourage kid-friendly recipe submissions. Maybe your young chef has a great recipe to share!

Qualified recipe submissions will be entered into a random drawing to win one of three $30 gift cards to First Alternative Co-op.

TO QUALIFY:

Recipes submitted must be appropriately attributed, either solely to you (family member, etc.), or otherwise identified as to its source. It’s fine if you build your creation around a recipe from a cookbook or website (like our favorites FoodHero.org and BigOven.com) then made it your own, but please tell us where you get it! (We cannot re-publish copyrighted material.)

What’s the name of your dish? Is it for vegans, vegetarians or omnivores? Is it kid-friendly?
What was the inspiration for your dish?
Your recipe, identifying the leftover or Eat First! food items you used from your fridge, freezer or pantry as the primary ingredients. Use as many as you can!
Estimate how much $$ you saved by not wasting those leftover items.
Include 1-2 photos of what you made (and a selfie if you like).

Use our Recipe Submission page to send it by Sunday April 11th (deadline extended from April 4th).

We will randomly draw (3) winners and announce them in our Earth Day blog and Coalition email lists. We’ll also highlight a number of our favorite recipe entries, and may publish an online cookbook. Stay Tuned!

EVERY RECIPE is an entry to win a $30 GIFT CARD! Submit more than one if you like, but please no more than four.

We’re looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

Happy fridges for happy holidays

December 4, 2020 // by Karen Kos

– No leftover turkey-wrangling for me this vegetarian Thanksgiving.

– The chanterelle orzo/rice and glazed carrots went great with sausage a couple days later. (I’m an omnivore.)

– The remaining half-carton of veggie stock I used in cooking the rice blended happily with leftover butternut, sweet potato, ginger and coconut milk into a tasty soup.

– The leftover sparkling wine made great mimosas!

– Next on the menu: leftover cranberry relish-glazed chicken thighs. And time to start a fresh series of Meal Plans! You can download and print ours here.

Hopefully this year’s Thanksgiving aftermath has also been a bit easier to manage for you, Conscious Food Consumers! So let’s all pat ourselves on the back, take note of lessons learned (if applicable) and get up for this next round of holiday meal planning.

Of course, the next round of planning, shopping and prepping also depends on making sure your fridge is happy! A happy fridge is well-lit, running efficiently, not overloaded (so it can do its job), and not over-inflating your utility bill. Here’s some simple things you can do that will also keep your pocketbook happy:

Does your utility provide a detailed energy usage report as part of its monthly billing statement? (Mine does.) If your fridge is consistently using more energy than it should, improving its efficiency might be as simple as dusting off the coils on the bottom or in the back. Or it could mean it’s time to upgrade — many utilities offer incentives through partners like Energy Trust of Oregon for replacing older appliances with new, energy-efficient models.

Regularly check your refrigerator/freezer temperatures. An ideal fridge temperature is 33°F to 38°F, and your freezer should be kept between 0°F and 5°F. Make sure the door gaskets for each compartment are kept free of debris and have a tight seal.

Make sure the cold air is circulating properly in both the fridge and freezer by not overloading and blocking the fan.

Consider freezing items that would normally take up space in the fridge “Eat First” area — like cheese, cooked grains, portions of tomato paste, or even knobs of fresh ginger. If you’re like me and can’t use an entire can of tomato paste in one recipe, you’ll appreciate the suggestion for freezing it in tablespoon-sized portions!

Download and print our Eat First! signs below:

JEANETTE CONFESSES regarding her Eat First shelf: After we went grocery shopping and were putting stuff into the fridge, we had to do a mini-cleanout/consolidation to make room for new items! We discovered some non-perishables had migrated into the Eat First shelf and blocked the visibility of perishables… which then went bad.

And it didn’t help that the light bulb on the right side of the compartment had burned out!

LESSONS LEARNED: Multiple!

LABEL EVERYTHING (even the obvious stuff) with sharpie and masking tape: What is it, and date placed on shelf. Maybe even label the front of the item instead of the lid for better visibility!

Replace fridge light bulbs promptly so you can see what’s in there.

Be more proactive about removing non-perishables that migrate onto Eat First shelf — unless we really want to eat them first.

Try creating a Freezer Inventory form for the fridge’s Eat First shelf OR just be a lot better about keeping it more sparsely populated so we can SEE everything!

Remember: food kept as leftovers but never eaten is the same thing as tossing it out in the first place. Wasted food is wasted MONEY!

Adventures in Leftover Land

November 6, 2020 // by Karen Kos

Greetings Conscientious Food Consumers!

With Thanksgiving not far off, we figured we’d get ahead of the game and talk leftovers in this installment of Kitchen Confessions. The topic’s not as sexy as last week’s carrots, but it’s one of those everyday challenges that we all face.

Those miscellaneous meal remnants, half-full containers, and portions of what-have-you, DO tend to get out of hand, don’t they?

Somehow they migrate to the most inconvenient recesses of your fridge. They get hijacked by microbes or neglected during busy times, like a tough week of homeschooling. They get abandoned in favor of preferred foods or convenience meals. Some might occasionally skip Leftovers Night on their weekly meal plan.

Let’s admit it — leftovers do get left behind sometimes!

Eat First! examples from Karen’s fridge shelf

KAREN CONFESSES right off the bat here: about half of the wasted food in my household once occupied the designated “Eat First” area of my fridge and cupboard. So what’s my issue? Keeping up with leftovers means keeping them accessible and safely stored, as well as keeping track of what’s in there!

It also takes a deliberate and creative effort to transform random food elements into a meal. I’m happy to report that it can be a pretty satisfying process! Maybe even a bit of an adventure…

KAREN ALSO CONFESSES: Two of the seven leftover items in the first photo (apple, sliced overripe pear, half a lime, a third of a packet of precooked rice, half a large roasted chile, a bit less than half a red onion, half-jar curry paste) got spoiled, wasted and composted. Fortunately, the rest found their way into oatmeal, stir fry and a pot of chili!

$$ WASTED: approximately $30 last month

LESSON LEARNED: I’m now a fan of BigOven.com and its inspirational three-ingredient search engine. It’s been both a delight and an Adventure to rummage for what I have on hand, plug it into the recipe search feature and see what comes up!

Big Oven is also available as an app for Android and iPhone/iPad (and is one of our featured downloadable “Apps!“). Big Oven’s massive recipe database contains more than 50,000 entries contributed by its members, including gluten-free, vegan/vegetarian, keto and low-carb dietary options.

In combination with NFLB’s downloadable Meal Planner, I’ve stepped up my diligence and am loving my leftovers more!

NO CORNBREAD LEFT OVERS LEFT BEHIND: These muffins were made from that “expired” cornbread mix featured in our “Check it before you chuck it” Kitchen Confessions a few weeks ago. The adventure began with a couple of chopped poblano chile peppers thrown in to jazz up the batter, which produced a baker’s dozen muffins. Half of them tasted good enough for outright scarfing and sharing with a friend! The “leftover” muffins were crumbled, seasoned and simmered with leeks and garlic for stuffing butternut squash, garnished with leftover feta cheese. No corn bread muffins left behind…

Karen’s everyday vs “company coffee” pots — drip vs perk (lower energy use) and fewer “cuppas” leftover/left behind

LEFTOVER COFFEE BUZZ: Turns out yesterday’s coffee brightens up lots of things besides brain cells — from milkshakes and smoothies to salad dressing, chili, brownies, bacon and BBQ sauce.

Coffee and bacon are staples of the typical American breakfast, but cooking the bacon in coffee is certainly a new idea to me!

NOTE: For my daily cuppa, I try to avoid “over-preparation” and waste of this global commodity by brewing small batches. Many days there’s nothing left in the pot, but it’s great to have ways to put it to good use on the days when there ‘s a half or full cup left over.

I also keep in mind the environmental costs and carbon footprint associated with my coffee enjoyment, as described in this Coffee Fact Sheet from the Oregon Department of Environment Quality.

A few other discoveries from my adventures in “Leftover Land”:

“LAST TWO BAGELS” BREAD PUDDING
LEFT OVER FETA, OLIVE & KALE FRITTATA (lots of variations on this one!)
GREEN SMOOTHIE, featuring RIPE AVOCADO and/or other past-their-prime fruits and veggies
SAUTEED WILTED LETTUCE & GREENS — Great use of those partial-packages of mixed greens that might otherwise get dumped at the first sign of sliminess
YOGURT SUNDAE with LEFTOVER JAM and coconut flakes
FROZEN BERRY-BANANA “LYCOPENE SMOOTHIE” with — you guessed it — tomatoes left over from the last season. After all, tomato is a fruit!

JEANETTE CONFESSES:

Ugh! I’ve been doing the right things the wrong way. With teenager sleepovers, I never know how much batter we’ll need, and I always figure I’ll use it up in the next day or two. The leftover batters were properly placed onto our “Eat First!” shelf, and I even date-labeled them. A Smart Strategy, right?

However, other still-edible Eat First items ended up in front of them and, well, they aged out. Creatively using up sour milk is one thing, but with raw eggs involved, there’s no way my pancakes or French toast would have been safe to use.

Those wasted beets were a bummer – they also got left behind other leftovers. There were four cooked beets to a package, but I only needed one that night. Subsequently, I forgot the rest of them, despite my date label.

LESSONS LEARNED:

Be even more conscious about using up items on my Eat First! shelf.
Limit how much we put there so things don’t get buried (kind of the whole point of that area!).
Be more mindful about creating leftovers in the first place – make juuusst enough batter so there’s nothing to store.

$$ Wasted: About $2, for two organic eggs and those portions of gluten free pancake mix and almond milk. However, this lesson also presented a disposal issue, because we’re supposed to keep liquids out of the compost. Almost forgot my wasted beets — so ACTUALLY $4 in total.

Learning to waste less food is both a journey and an adventure!

No more “freeze it and forget it”!

October 29, 2020 // by Jeanette Hardison

If you were expecting a lurid foodie tale about eager veggies, twisting around each other in the privacy of soil, only to be exposed by a hungry, voyeuristic gardener, that’s an entirely different blog!

If you have forgotten freezer food, you are in the right place!

Many well-meaning freezer users have put good food away for later, but then forgot it there and it froze to death.

This unfortunate habit is just like throwing edible food into the garbage, simply because the outcome is the same… and composting it is only one step better than garbage.

When you include the cost of running an overfull freezer, plus any gas spent driving it home, the cost of disposal (if you don’t compost it), all the many resources that went into growing it and so on, that forgotten freezer food could become your “kitchen confession”! Wasted food happens to all of us… even our staff!

The easy solution is a Freezer Inventory, one of our many Smart Strategies! It’s a simple 8.5″ x 11″ form you can download, print out and hang on the front of your fridge or freezer, and change as you go (also en Español). We recommend using a pencil for easier updating.Here’s how to use it!

ADDITIONAL TIPS:

Another Smart Strategy is our Eat First! signs (also en Español), to use anywhere in your kitchen to help ID which items need to be used up the soonest. Simply print and trim, and apply to any food or shelf containing those items!

Overfull freezers function less efficiently! CONFESSION: Recently, my own freezer was too stuffed and the little vent/fan at the back sounded awful! It was working too hard, and frost had built up… if I hadn’t noticed, my whole freezer motor might have failed. Yikes! A lesson to keep it clear and not too full.

Items in the freezer door are subject to greater temperature variations, so be more mindful of what gets stored there.

Food safety also depends on maintaining consistent fridge and freezer temperatures, so be sure to keep your fridge between 38°F and 42°F and your freezer between 0°F and 5°F to be safe.

The US FDA recommends specific storage lengths for specific foods, for maintaining quality. One of our favorite resources for safe food storage is StillTasty.com.

Remember: most frozen food is safe indefinitely, but be sure to double-wrap food and eat it before it’s freezer burned.

I CONFESS: We were still “freezing and forgetting” stuff at home when we started No Food Left Behind – Corvallis. I hadn’t yet implemented this Smart Strategy! Since we did, we’ve had no more freezer-burned food, items are rotated out more often, and everything is getting used. The Freezer Inventory really works and our family is saving money in the process!

Not only that, but our meals have also become more varied as we’ve forced ourselves to get creative with ingredients we might not normally put together. I often consult BigOven.com’s leftovers page, which enables users to type in two or three ingredients and receive existing recipes that use those very items. Just click on “BigOven, what can I make?” – highly recommended! BigOven also offers an app – click here for NFLB’s favorite apps!

Thank you in advance for recommending our Freezer Inventory to any friends with forgotten freezer foods… and if you need one too, that’s okay! This is Kitchen Confessions, and your story is safe with us. 😉 We invite you to share your stories in the comments! Confessions? Or maybe you started using the inventory and want to celebrate? Let us know.

As for those lurid carrots, we’ll have to get to the ROOT of that some other day…