Curbing Our Food Waste

 

I've been doing a lot of different things in preparation of my big day.  Since December we've been experimenting quite a bit with ways to save and be more frugal.  We've changed up the way we cook, eat and use our leftover food with a huge emphasis on NO food waste and so far it has been pretty amazing.  The easiest thing of course is to eat your leftovers and make sure things are used up before they go bad.  But taking it a step further, before we toss something out, we consider how else we might use it first.  This has led me to keeping a gallon sized Ziploc bag (previously used and washed out) in our freezer to collect vegetable scraps for making stock.  Meat bones are saved for that purpose as well.

 

I've been doing a fair bit of canning over the months in an effort to add another element of long term food storage.  Recently I browned up six pounds of ground beef which I drained before canning in beef broth made from bones and veggie scraps I had in the freezer.  The drained fat was placed in the refrigerator overnight and in the morning, once it had solidified I popped it out of the bowl and discovered I also had a cup of beef juices underneath.  I placed the fat into a bag (another Ziploc I had washed out to reuse) and plan to melt it and mix it with scratch grains to make suet cakes for our chickens.  The remaining juices were added to some gravy I made which not only allowed us a larger batch, but added some great flavor as well.

 

When we didn’t finish the milk before it went sour I used it to make stroganoff and in a batch of biscuits in place of buttermilk.  We also stretch our milk by buying whole milk and diluting it 50/50 with filtered water. Sour milk is often called for in a lot of recipes in vintage cookbooks.  There is nothing wrong with sour milk, it just doesn't taste very good to drink or put on your cereal.  But for baking and cooking it is wonderful.  I'm only buying our milk when it goes on sale and in the meantime if we need some and don't have any fresh I have a pint jar of powdered milk in the pantry to use until I buy more at the store.

 

Again, before anything gets tossed I make sure first if I can use it some other way first.  After making beef stock all of the skimmed fat and spent veggies went out to he chickens.  The bits of meat went into soup and the only thing that ended up in the trash was the bones.  I froze some of the broth, made a batch of soup and the rest was canned and added to the long term storage pantry.  I have also made chicken broth from a roast chicken carcass and saved veggie scraps as well as ham broth from the bone and saved drippings from the Christmas ham.  I froze all of those broths in saved cottage cheese and sour cream containers.  Some of that delicious ham broth was used to make a batch of delicious split pea soup along with the ham bits that came off of the bone.  It was so good.

 

Bacon has been hit hard by inflation and the prices have sky rocketed.  Fortunately I was able to stock up when it went on sale.  Although we have plenty we want to make it last so we aren't going crazy with the bacon.  I cook less of it for a meal now, but surprisingly we aren't missing those extra slices.  We're just happy to have it.  And of course all that wonderful rendered bacon fat is saved and used for cooking.  I keep a pint jar in the refrigerator and each time I cook bacon I had the drippings to it.  When I cook meat, eggs, make country gravy or sauté vegetables I use that fat which adds so much wonderful flavor to the recipe.  Once again, we don't feel at all deprived.

 

My girl Edith

Stale bread can be used for toast, croutons or made into bread crumbs.  My chickens love it too and consider it a treat.  Since we've been extra careful lately they don't get much bread these days, but I still make a point to share with them a little bit.  Tortilla chip crumbs in the bottom of the bag are saved in a jar and used as a topping for taco salads.

 

Another thing I am doing is composting.  Since I've been doing so well reusing the veggie scraps my compost bucket typically only collects coffee grounds and filters, tea bags, and crushed up egg shells.  I will talk more about composting in a future blog because I think it is super important that we do this, especially now.  I'd also love to hear some of the ways you control food waste.