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Eliminating Waste: Recipes & Repurposing-Bread

January 3, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Last year I talked a bit about how I’m really trying to focus on wasting less food (or anything else, really) to save money. As part of that goal for 2011, I hope to do an ongoing series of posts with ideas and recipes to help us all accomplish this.  Since trash day is tomorrow, I’m cleaning things out and trying to find new uses for things. What I have too much of: bread. I have two half-loaves of regular sandwich bread and a half loaf of Italian bread that I bought on 12/31 to go with our meal. That bread is too stale to be eaten as is. The other bread has some life in it, and as long as we eat sandwiches for lunch every day, won’t go to waste.  But here are some ideas of things to do with bread that is either stale or about to be.

First, I love this Mario Batali meatball recipe. So I cut up 3 cups’ worth of bread crumbs, put them in a vac sealer bag, vac sealed it and tossed them in the freezer. Next time I want to make the meatballs, I’ll already have stale bread ready to go!

Then, I took what was left and cut that up into small bite-sized bits. Tossed with a few Tbsps of olive oil, some olive oil dipping spices, baked at 300 for about 30-40 minutes. Homemade croutons! And they are better than anything else you’d buy. Don’t have the dipping spices? Use garlic, garlic powder, garlic salt, rosemary, salt, pepper, Italian seasonings…be creative and you’ll be surprised at how good they are. I particulary like them not only to dress up a boring salad, but to dress up a boring can of soup on a night we need a quick dinner.

When I was little, my Nan would grab us, the stale bread, and take us down to Cedar Beach on Hamilton Blvd (Allentown, PA) to feed the ducks. I just need to find a duck pond around here and you have a fun, free family activity. We actually have ducks right across the street, but my boys have not yet discovered that the White Clay Creek is right across the street, and I don’t want them to know it’s there, they’re too young and I don’t trust either of them to not wander off and K loves to play in water and can’t swim. Too dangerous, but now I’m rambling……

Most bread stuffing recipes are easy to make. A little celery, some sage, some broth and there you go. Or, cube it and freeze it for when you do want to make stuffing and you won’t have to buy bread cubes.

French Toast! And it’s not just for breakfast anymore!

Grilled cheese-if the bread isn’t too stale, still have a decent sandwich. Same goes for toast.

Pilling a dog-my one dog takes many meds and is hard to pill. I do a small swipe of peanut butter on bread, put the pills on it and squish it into a bread ball and she’ll eat it.

Put a piece in your brown sugar container to absorb moisture. Remove after a few days and it should extend the life of your brown sugar.

Lots of other recipes like bread puddings (yuk, sorry) call for stale bread.

Prepare it for a future recipe: Cube it, vacuum seal it and freeze it for when you need it. The price of one of my vac sealer bags is still less than what it would cost to buy bread for a recipe.

Good luck & let’s eliminate waste to cut down on spending this year.

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some recipes for garbage

October 20, 2010 by · Leave a Comment

How is everyone doing with reducing the amount of food you waste/throw out? I can say my amount is rapidly decreasing, and I’m much more aware of the perishables I’m purchasing each week. I’m also getting much more creative with repurposing food. Here are a few ideas:

Fruit: depends on the type of fruit that has bad spots or is about to go bad. There are lots of different things you can do with apples–from an easy apple crisp made with corn flakes, to this recipe for sauteed apples. And I have successfully used most apple recipes, except substituted pears, and they’ve all been good. Bananas make banana bread of course, or make the pudding thing with Nilla wafers. Also, if you stick a banana in the fridge, it will remain in it’s current state, for about another 48 hours. Even if the skin gets brown/black, on the inside it’s fine. Berries and stuff like that–give them a quick whiz in the blender with some yogurt, any flavor that’s compatible, to make a smoothie.

Veggies: Like fruit, it depends on the veggie. Last night I made this recipe. It was very good! It also served as sort of a garbage-pail soup–it used up the chicken from the roast chicken I made on Sunday, and used up whatever veggies were in our veggie drawer. I used fresh broccoli, not frozen. I also happened to have some tortellini in my stockpile, plus free broth and soup! Egg noodles would have worked just as well, or rotini or pasta alphabets.

Other things I do with veggies: Peppers-diced them up (sometimes grill them first) and in a pan with some olive oil and garlic. Put in pasta or as a topping for homemade pizza. Use eggs and make either a fritatta or a quiche. Quiche has a crust, fritattas don’t–so depends on whether I have any pie crusts in freezer. But the pizzas, quiche and fritattas also serve to use up eggs that may be nearing an end-date, as well as left over scraps of cheese. Or omelettes. I usually just do an internet search for recipes then modify it to what I have on hand.

I’ll post more ideas that I’ve gathered later on–right now I have a baby to tend to!

ETA: Just as I posted this, THIS popped up on my yahoo feed.

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eliminating waste to save money

August 18, 2010 by · Leave a Comment

On Mondays I feed my family garbage. Not literally of course. Tuesday is our trash day, so every Monday I clean out the refrigerator and determine what stays, what goes and what really should be eaten now or it will go bad. And we don’t just necessarily eat only leftovers on Mondays, I try to be creative and make it into something interesting. A leftover hamburger may become a taco salad, leftover chicken breast a chicken Caesar salad, leftover lunch meat into a turkey & cheddar melt….and so on. It’s usually a big salad night for us as well, so that we don’t waste produce.

I like this Monday habit I’ve developed for several reasons. One is that nothing is in my fridge long enough to stink it up, or to become so unidentifiable that I don’t want to touch it.

But the main reason is that it’s really allowed me to focus on what we’re wasting on a weekly basis and how much money we’re throwing away. Sure, it may only be  few slimy pieces of lunchmeat. But lunchmeat around here can be $9-$12 per lb. Just a few pieces of lunchmeat=$3 or $4. A bag of prewashed salad is $4 or $5 not on sale, so even if you’re only throwing out a third of the bag, that’s a buck or two.

This article from Slate quotes some studies that say Americans waste as much as 40% of our food. Forty percent! Are you wasting 40%?

Start monitoring what you are throwing away on a weekly basis and try keeping a mental tally. Next time you’re at the grocery store, before you purchase those highly-perishable items, ask yourself “Do I have this at home? Are we really going to eat this? Do I have a plan in place and a recipe in mind to use this item?”

Get into a garbage-night habit. Clean out your refrigerator weekly so that you’re mindful of what you’re using and what you’re wasting. Then turn that into actual savings at the store. It’s a very easy way to trim your bill–eat the food instead of throwing it away.

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{recipe} banana sour cream cake

January 8, 2009 by · 2 Comments

Edited, October 2012: Breathing new life into old posts, since I now have a fancy recipe plug-in. I originally posted this recipe in January of 2009. Acme and Superfresh shoppers may remember that around that time, we had more freebies than we knew what to do with! We had free cream cheese, cake mix, sour cream (remember that, during Superfresh triples??) and more. So since I had so much of this stuff around, I had to figure out something to do with it. Enter, this cake! I now make it quite often in the cooler months. It’s also a good go-to recipe for brown bananas.

Banana sour cream cake
 

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Prep time

Cook time

Total time

 

This is a recipe I got from a Kraft ad many years ago. Like many recipes, I’ve modified it to suit my tastes. This is an indulgence, not for fat and carb counters!
Author:
Recipe type: Dessert, budget friendly
Cuisine: American
Serves: 12

Ingredients
  • 1 pkg. (2-layer size) yellow cake mix
  • 1 cup mashed ripe bananas (about 3)
  • 1 cup Sour Cream
  • 3 eggs
  • ¼ cup oil
  • 1 pkg. (8 oz.) Cream Cheese, softened
  • ½ cup butter, softened
  • 1 pkg. (16 oz.) powdered sugar
  • 1 cup finely chopped Walnuts (optional)

Instructions
  1. HEAT oven to 350°F.
  2. BEAT first 5 ingredients with mixer on low speed just until moistened, stopping frequently to scrape bottom and side of bowl.
  3. Beat on medium speed 2 min.
  4. Pour into greased and floured 13×9-inch pan.
  5. BAKE 35 min. or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
  6. Cool completely.
  7. BEAT cream cheese and butter with mixer until well blended.
  8. Gradually beat in sugar.
  9. REMOVE cake from pan.
  10. Carefully cut cake crosswise in half using serrated knife.
  11. Place 1 cake half, top-side down, on plate; spread with some of the frosting.
  12. Top with remaining cake half, top-side up.
  13. Spread top and sides with remaining frosting.
  14. Press nuts into sides.
  15. Keep refrigerated.

Notes
I often split this recipe up and just make parts of it. If I don’t have cream cheese, I use a container of ready-made frosting, either chocolate or cream cheese. I love bananas and chocolate together. Also, if I need a recipe for cream cheese icing, this is what I use. We love cream cheese icing on chocolate cake. I have also used two rounds instead of the 13x9x2 and cutting it. I also do not care for nuts on things and have never made it with the walnuts.

 

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