So, we are in mid January! I know for me one of my resolutions is almost always about food. Whether it’s eating healthier, doing more meal prep, planning meals better, trying to eat the rest of the chocolate that’s in the cupboards!! I mean, it’s chocolate, I can’t just throw it away!
This year one of my goals, is to waste less food. I always end up buying or cooking too much and I forget to meal plan with my leftovers. I know, rookie move, right!? My leftovers end up filling our green bin rather than our bellies. And it means we are tossing money down the drain!
If you use a green bin then you know how revolting it can be! Plus it increases the fly population monumentally! We don’t need more of those suckers!
Wasting less food, is really about planning better!
Here are a few tricks I have started using this year to help me with my waste less goal.
1. I have been keeping all of my cut veggie ends from things like carrots, onions, and celery. Everytime I cut up my veggies, I pull out my freezer bag and add the ends. Once the bag is full, I am going to make a veggie stock out of them.
2. I incorporate my leftovers into our weekly plan. Our garbage day is Thursday. So in the past, Wednesday night, often after the kids went to bed, my husband and I would pull out all of the bad stuff from the fridge. Sometimes we could not even figure out what was in a container! How gross!! Now, for this year, we have leftover Wednesdays! I sort through the fridge earlier in the day and pull out meals to heat up. The other thing I do is take a quick inventory of the fridge on Sunday night so that I know what I need to urgently cook with in the beginning of the week. It’s about knowing what you have to prioritize.
3. When you start to get low on food from the grocery store, try to make it one more whole week, or at least half a week. It’s interesting how creative you can get with those trailing foods that might otherwise die a horrible “death by refrigerator” if you don’t push yourself to use them up.
Those are just a couple of things I am doing extra to really prioritize my leftovers and to waste less food. What tricks do you use to ensure you’re filling yourself, not the garbage or green bin? I am always up for hearing what creative things you do!
Throughout January I am going to be posting a lot about food, meal planning, and feeding the freezer! Stay tuned!
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