Waste Not

So we have been making some serious effort to waste less food. Here are some of the things we are currently doing.

1. Only buy what is written on the grocery list, no extras.
2. Eat what is in the fridge before it expires/goes bad.
3. Don't forget about the leftovers in the back of the fridge.
4. Only make enough food for dinner and one leftover meal.
5. Put less food on Jacob's plate. He can ask for seconds if he likes.
6. Compost.

Some other things I decided to do on my own were:

1. Save all bread ends or stale scraps in the freezer and make my own bread crumbs.
2. Make all my own baby fruit and vegetable purees.
3. Eat salad.
4. Be creative.

Now, I have taken this last one a step farther this week:

1. I finished off a box of mini wheats and there was a huge amount of shredded wheat bits left in the bag. I didn't want to save it for breakfast because it would instantly turn to mush when I put milk on it. So I whipped up a batch of blueberry muffins and substituted some of the flour with all the cereal crumbs. The were really delicious (I think my brother ate 4 in one afternoon). Daniel and Jacob both enjoyed them too.

2. I made jam this week with frozen raspberries we picked last summer. (I should confess that Jeff picked them, I sat around and watched the kids) After I thawed them, there was a lot of juice that I didn't want to put in the jam for fear of making it too runny. I carefully saved it, but I didn't want to drink it, because that might be way too sweet. So I whipped up a batch of chocolate chocolate chip muffins and substituted the raspberry juice for most of the milk. I figured the flavour would definitely turn out because chocolate and raspberry were made for each other, but I wondered about whether the muffins would actually have a good texture and be edible. Anyways, they turned out amazing and almost had the look of red velvet cake.

Kitchen Challenge - JANUARY

Ready to eat!

Hmmmm... these are different.

Yum!

Tortillas! Well, I would say that these were actually really successful. (See my 2011 Kitchen Challenge page for the recipe) I skipped step 3 (refrigerate), mostly because I forgot that that was one of the steps when I was planning what time to start dinner tonight. The first one turned out crispy so I did make a couple of adjustments. The directions, to me at least, make it sound like you should wait to flip it until brown spots start to appear on the top. DON'T DO THAT! Flip it as soon as it starts to puff up. After the first one, the rest were really nice and easily rolled into fajitas. They really only take 2 minutes each.

Secret Seasoning Salt

I love seasoning salt. We used to buy it and I would put in on fries and they would be so delicious. But that stuff is terrible for you so we haven't bought it in two years. We make hash-browns every so often and have experimented with different spices but they were never quite right. I figured that there must be a recipe out there for seasoning salt so that I could make up just a little bit. Well... I found a recipe for Lo-Salt Seasoning Salt online. I didn't have everything for it, (and wasn't about to go shopping just to test it out) and tweaked it a bit to make it "my own". I made up a small fraction of the recipe, just enough for a frying pan of hash-browns (or little fries as Jacob calls them) and it was so good that I made up a big batch of it and now I have a jar-full in my cupboard. I don't know how much salt is in the stuff you buy but there are 11 tablespoons of spices total in the jar and only 1 is salt. That's 1/11th for those of you who enjoy my kitchen math. I can't wait for BBQ season so I can use this on my tinfoil potatoes.

Here it is before I shook it up.
Can you guess the ingredients?

Bread and Honey

I have been making a lot of bread lately. Yesterday I made two loaves of egg bread (for a certain special occasion coming up) and today I made two loaves of my standard "white wheat bread" (sorta white, sorta whole wheat) and two loaves of chocolate zucchini bread. This last bread should be interesting because it is an experiment with honey... I found an article here about how to substitute honey for sugar. I have tried it in oatmeal cookies and they were amazing. So far I find my regular bread doesn't rise as nicely when I take out all the sugar so I only sub half of it. But today I took all the sugar (2 cups for 2 loaves) out of the recipe and used 1 1/3 cup honey instead. Honey, zucchini, and chocolate sound like a good combination... I just have to wait another 32 minutes to find out.
On a similar subject, Jacob has started calling Daniel "Honey Honey." So cute.