Pages

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Thoughts

I've been doing this blog (quite regularly, I might add) for a few months. At the onset, I realized I was wasting food, but I didn't address that as a primary issue requiring resolution for this blog. Well, now that I've had some opportunity to reflect (i.e. review the blog), I realize that food-waste is a BIG problem for me.

This came on when I realized
  1. We were having baked potatoes a lot
  2. The worms were eating better than we were

Not a good situation.

I regularly have an abundance of worm food, which was NOT what I was going for. I'm not exactly sure, but I think I know why I waste so much so often. So here's a list of what I've determined as contributing characteristics of mine that only add to waste:
  1. I like to think we're going to eat greens/salads regularly which will allow us more balanced meals leading us to healthier eating and well-being.
  2. I buy items to make salads but don't follow through on actually making them.
  3. I plan menus based on main courses but don't typically have sides planned.
  4. I plan main courses and don't follow through on preparing them, which means I buy ingredients that stay unopened and forgotten, become worm fodder, or are thrown away.
  5. Leftovers are essentially a turn-off since they are just warmed up food from the day(s) previous. They end up just going to waste.
  6. I got sucked into eating out for lunch every day at work at my new job.

This is what I'm going to do to reduce my waste:

  1. Plan side/salad recipes to accompany main course recipes I plan on making.
  2. Prepare the sides/salads based on recipes rather than let the ingredients go bad in the fridge.
  3. Plan full meals with sides in addition to the main (meat) course.
  4. Blog my meal plan for the week, which will help me stay in focus during the week, rather than diverging, making a half-assed meal plan and forgetting it later in the week and blaming my meal-planning forgetfulness on having lost the grocery list/weekly meal plan.
  5. Reduce the amount of food leftover or, more realistically, plan meals so leftovers will be "multi-functional" by creating a new combination of food, whether that be something entirely new, or simply cutting-in different sides to accompany a main course.
  6. I will bring leftovers to work for lunches, which will reduce my food, and ultimately, $ and resource waste.
Now that I've recognized my faults and ways to overcome them, I hope to have less bull crap in the fridge, tons less worm food, and more healthy meals for Rodney and me.

Hopefully, I'll see some improvement!

3 comments:

Jess said...

I love your ideas and I think that these are going to make a big difference! Even just bringing leftovers to lunch is huge. I don't know if this is helpful, but I do think the cooking does make it inherently really difficult not to waste some food. I say that because I'm pretty perfectionistic about not wasting food and it takes me quite a while to keep track of all the ingredients that need to be used up and to look up recipes that use them up, and sometimes time is money or you just don't have that time to be able to do that, not to mention that this is an unending cycle. On the other hand, if you focus on the strategies that you talked about which really focus especially on not letting big ingredients that you bought for the week go to waste, I really think that your going to see a lot less food waste! Good luck! I will enjoy reading your blog moving forward to see how this worked itself out, as I'm about 6 years behind right now LOL.

The Cook said...

Your being six years behind is a probably a good thing. I need to get back into this since I've returned to horrible eating and buying habits. -_- This annoys me, one perfectionist to another.

Jess said...

I understand completely!!!