Day 1: Easy gluten-free meatballs with homemade pasta sauce, Wild rice salad
Day 2: Creamy carrot soup, Corn muffins
Day 3: Homemade pizza, Spinach salad
Day 4: White beans and bacon, Warm applesauce
Day 5: Salmon with pesto, Creamed spinach, Orange slices
Day 6: Spinach soup with homemade rosemary croutons
Day 7: Fridge dump
Notes: Eat All of Your Food!
Woohoo local spinach is back! I’m loading it in this week – super healthy stuff going on here (with a little bacon!). Note that the picture above is a throwback as I don’t have a picture of my produce from this week.
Okay, now on to week three of my miniseries on reducing food waste. Week one we talked about meal planning. Week two was all about food shopping and embracing “ugly” produce. This week we are going to talk about eating your food.
It seems like it should go without saying, but once the food gets into your house you have to eat it! To me, this means more than just following your meal plan. Although it is super important to make sure that you eat the food you planned for, there are a lot of other ways that we let our food go to waste. Here are a few tips to make sure you eat all of your food:
- Don’t peel your vegetables! There is so much nutrition in the peels of many fruits and vegetables, why would you want to trash it? Carrots, apples, and potatoes – scrub them then eat them, peel and all! Teach your kids early to eat the peels and they will be none the wiser. Of course there are some vegetables with a tough outer peel that needs to be removed, like winter squash (delicata squash peel is delicious though), and citrus. We’ll cover how to deal with those peels next week.
- Make a meal of leftovers. If you plan seven different suppers each week like I do, you are bound to have some leftovers. In my house, leftovers go straight into lunch boxes for the next day. You also could purposefully make a large meal and have leftovers to eat the next night. Whatever you do, make sure you eat those leftovers!
- Do a fridge dump every once in a while. This means taking a deep dive into your fridge to discover all the things that have to be eaten ASAP. Then I let my kids go wild and make their own supper. There have been some interesting combinations over the years and also some really delicious ideas like whipped cream and fruit or a veggie wrap. Maybe you need to do this once a week, maybe once a month. As you get better and better at meal planning, you will notice that you have less fresh food sitting around that doesn’t have a purpose. I’ve noticed some food piling up in my fridge so I’ve included a dump at the end of this week. I’m also off the hook for cooking that night!
- Use catch-all recipes at the end of the week. If you checked out my article on meal planning you may have noticed that my general weekly template includes a catch-all recipe at the end of the week. This is a meal like stir-fry, egg scramble, or soup that is flexible to accommodate any veggies you have on hand. Similar to a fridge dump, this trick will help you clear out all those perishables before they start growing fuzz.
