Food waste and a menu, week 4/29-5/5.

Pin It

First, I want to thank you all who stopped by here and left your sweet comments. You, guys, are amazing, and I appreciate your friendship.

And now I have to be honest. After bragging telling you last week about my record of no food waste for six weeks, I think I jinxed myself :) We didn't really waste any everyday food from our fridge, but I did clean the freezer (my feeble attempt for spring cleaning this month, I guess :). And here's what I discarded:

I threw away two bags of corn tortillas, two small bags of mixed greens (spinach and kale) and some crushed potato chip crumbs. All of it was badly freezer burned. I have a confession to make- I DO NOT like the taste of corn tortillas. There, I said it. I just don't (please, don't throw rocks at me right now...). I tried to make chips out of them, use them in Hispanic version of lasagna, burritos, and no...still don't like it. I got these tortillas for almost free last year with some sort of a coupon but that was one of those examples of when you buy something cheap or with coupon but you are not going to eat it, it's still a waste of money :(  I kept moving them around until they eventually went to the garbage can :( Potato chip crumbs I kept for some recipe and forgot all about it. And greens just got lost in the very back of the freezer (insert a sad sniff here...).

So now I created an inventory of everything that we have in our freezer. That's how it looks right now:

It's not pretty but it's functional, and I know where what goes. The first shelf has a box full of purees and sauces (pumpkin, squash, cauliflower, pizza and pasta sauces, grated zucchini, etc.). In my search of adding more veggies into my younger boy's diet, I started adding pumpkin and squash to pasta sauce, and it's awesome! I literally do half and half, and I can barely taste the difference, and we all get even more benefits from the sauce.

The second shelf has frozen fruit and veggies most of which we use for smoothies. The third has meats and fish, and on the forth and fifth we just keep random frozen things that need to be used up soon.

With all of this in mind, I created our menu mostly around what we have at home. I will do a few grocery trips this week because we are low on many things (because it's the beginning of the new month!) but here's how our menu looks so far:

Mon.- Russian crepes with sour cream and homemade jam

Tues.- potatoes with chicken and corn on the cob

Wed.- breakfast for dinner (eggs, sausage links- bumped from last week), carrots, watermelon

Thurs.- some sort of a soup

Fr.- grilled chicken, salad

Sat.- salmon, brown rice, green beans

Sun.- pork roast, mashed potatoes, broccoli

We will also make smoothies a few times this week because the Little Guy will not eat any veggies on my list (well, maybe, salad. Of all things, he likes just green salad with Ranch)

So what's on your menu this week?