[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #00adef;”] O[/dropcap]ne thing I really hate is wasting food.
Especially since I’ve discovered from the guys at Oz Harvest that 1/3 of the worlds food production is wasted.
One third!
I know.
I’m OK when it comes to not wasting the ingredients I buy.
However, there are plenty of little bits of food left on my plate (and the boys) that usually get fed to the chooks.
So I started keeping a Mason-style jar of ‘random bites’ in the fridge to save these little morsels.
And challenged myself to use my ‘random jar’ first when building my Abundance Bowls for lunches and dinners.
And you know what?
There hasn’t been a single time when something has tasted bad.
Plenty of times when I’ve thought ‘I’m not sure this will go together…’.
But not once have I had to ‘force’ myself to eat something icky.
In fact they’ve been really delicious.
And even better, it feels like we’re using significantly less food.
Which means less shopping.
Win win!
If you’d like to try this for yourself, it’s super easy.
Just save any random bites in a Mason jar / any jar / container and use them in your next meal.
And let me know what you find in the comments below!
I’d love to hear from you :)
More on reducing food waste
- 3 Steps to Avoiding Wasted Ingredients
- A Simple (and Incredibly Tasty) Way to Use Up Leftovers
- What to Do with Leftover Ingredients
- reduce. reuse. recycle. how the 3Rs can help you with the washing up
- An insiders guide to use-by dates
Have fun in the kitchen!
With love,
Jules x
In the winter when not composting or having pigs, I save my vegetable scraps and make stock from them!
Great idea Madeleine! I can imagine keeping pigs would be very rewarding :)
Dear Jules
Since you already have diabetes, but intend to experiment with low carb diets, maybe you should be medically monitored so that you don’t go into insulin shock by reducing your carbs too much.
I am not a diabetic so I don’t really know the details but I have read about curing diabetes through dieting/fasting and for diabetics this must be monitored. The books I read were by Jason Fung- you can easily find them online if you are interested.
Because I was worried and my family all has diabetes, I followed Fung’s suggestions and then had an INSULIN TEST. The test runs on a scale of 2.5 – 10 and my result was 3, so I think the regime Fung suggests works.
Thanks for your concern Jan!
It’s OK I’ve been eating low carb for over 5 years and it’s fine. I think the monitoring is really required for people on medication for their diabetes.
Glad to hear you’ve had success with Dr Fung’s regieme.
Jx
Since you feed the food to the chickens I don’t think in your old method the food was actually wasted, but the new method is definitely tastier! In my family, we will have what we call a dibs and dabs dinner. When we get towards the end of the week and the refrigerator is full of little dibs and dabs of things we’ve eaten that week, we load it all out onto the dinner table. There’s never enough for everybody to have a serving of anything specific but there’s plenty for everybody to have a full plate and then the refrigerator is cleaned out for another week. When I’m alone, I do something similar with a curry at the end of the week. I’ll take all of my dibs and dabs mix it with a can of coconut milk and a can Of curry paste and cook it up on the stove. Since everything is already cooked it takes about five minutes. Longer for the rice if I don’t have any already made but I’ll then serve it right over some delicious rice and once again the refrigerator is cleaned out.
Great ideas Andrea!
Although I prefer to call them ‘abundance bowls’ rather than dribs and drabs :)
My mom tells me she has started to make a “just-throw-it-all-in” soup every time left-overs start piling up in her fridge.