some recipes for garbage

How is everyone doing with reducing the amount of food you waste/throw out? I can say my amount is rapidly decreasing, and I’m much more aware of the perishables I’m purchasing each week. I’m also getting much more creative with repurposing food. Here are a few ideas:

Fruit: depends on the type of fruit that has bad spots or is about to go bad. There are lots of different things you can do with apples–from an easy apple crisp made with corn flakes, to this recipe for sauteed apples. And I have successfully used most apple recipes, except substituted pears, and they’ve all been good. Bananas make banana bread of course, or make the pudding thing with Nilla wafers. Also, if you stick a banana in the fridge, it will remain in it’s current state, for about another 48 hours. Even if the skin gets brown/black, on the inside it’s fine. Berries and stuff like that–give them a quick whiz in the blender with some yogurt, any flavor that’s compatible, to make a smoothie.

Veggies: Like fruit, it depends on the veggie. Last night I made this recipe. It was very good! It also served as sort of a garbage-pail soup–it used up the chicken from the roast chicken I made on Sunday, and used up whatever veggies were in our veggie drawer. I used fresh broccoli, not frozen. I also happened to have some tortellini in my stockpile, plus free broth and soup! Egg noodles would have worked just as well, or rotini or pasta alphabets.

Other things I do with veggies: Peppers-diced them up (sometimes grill them first) and in a pan with some olive oil and garlic. Put in pasta or as a topping for homemade pizza. Use eggs and make either a fritatta or a quiche. Quiche has a crust, fritattas don’t–so depends on whether I have any pie crusts in freezer. But the pizzas, quiche and fritattas also serve to use up eggs that may be nearing an end-date, as well as left over scraps of cheese. Or omelettes. I usually just do an internet search for recipes then modify it to what I have on hand.

I’ll post more ideas that I’ve gathered later on–right now I have a baby to tend to!

ETA: Just as I posted this, THIS popped up on my yahoo feed.

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