I thought I was good at it!
As I might have mentioned once or twice I have signed up to National Zero Waste Week which starts next week. Rae has challenged those who signed up to keep an eye on their food waste this week and for those who have time to keep a food waste diary.
I don’t know if I will manage it every day, but I had a go at it yesterday. I thought that my family didn’t have much in the way of food waste, but actually I couldn’t believe the amount of food I chucked away yesterday.
- At breakfast time my youngest didn’t quite manage all his porridge so off that went to the rubbish bin.
- We went out for the day and took a packed lunch out with us. I ate all my salad, my husband and kids however managed to leave around half their sandwiches! They went in the rubbish bin.
- We went fruit and veg picking and while picking it was far too easy to be wasteful. Some of the ripest raspberries practically flew off the bushes, out of my grasp disappearing from sight. Corn on the cobs which looked okay from the outside weren’t quite ready on the inside…I picked a pak choi plant and then noticed it had things wriggling in it, so didn’t buy it..
- At home having bought so much in the way of fruit and veg (probably not a great idea just before zero waste week), I needed to clean out my fruit and veg drawer. I found a soft and squishy carrot and an over ripe pear which both went straight into the compost bin, along with a few scraps of onion skins and spinach leaves and another pear which never ripened. I cut both the pears open and tasted them first, but they were not nice.
- I also had a failed attempt at making tomato ketchup lurking in the fridge (I have been thinking about having a go at it for a while, but when Jen over at My Make Do and Mend Year had a go, I felt a sudden urge – it was not a success so back to the drawing board…) I made a basic tomato base and then only tinkered with a quarter of my mixture to try out the ketchup and put the other parts of the mixture in the freezer, so minimised some of the waste. The failed ketchup went in the compost bin.
It wasn’t all bad though we ate all our dinner and when cleaning up the vegetables we picked I chopped off and reused the some of the carrot tops as foliage in a vase with some feverfew flowers from our garden.
Let’s hope today is a less wasteful day!
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This post has been shared at Waste Not Want Not Wednesday.
I threw out a bunch of purslane I bought at the farmers market and kept telling myself I'd experiment with (never tried it before), but never got around to it. I always hate throwing away food! Meal planning has been helping a lot with that, though 🙂
Thanks for sharing, I'm featuring this tonight on Waste Not Want Not.
Thanks Danielle!