Right, I have a much more interesting day for you today and thankfully I'm still on track for zero waste - but I had to actually take some pro-active action today! Let's get the dull bits out of the way first.
Breakfast
No food waste. Can you guess why? Well done, I did indeed have a weighed out portion of muesli and a banana. Oh, and I might have had a cheeky nutty bar for elevenses before I headed out. I know, I know, I live on the edge!
Lunch
No food waste. Out at meetings today so it was a working lunch on the go.
And this is where things get a tad more interesting...dun, dun, dah...
Dinner
No food waste, but it took some effort. I had planned to have sausages and mash this week and the dull grey London skies and incessant drizzle suggested this was a comfort food day.
Firstly, I portioned up my pack of sausages. Having taken two for dinner, I packed the remainder, paired off (there's really some kind of Noah reference there but it's too late for my brain to work it out), into an old takeaway box ready for the freezer. The greaseproof paper layer means I only have to extract a brace of porky cylinders from their cold sleep at a time. Perfect for a cheeky sausage sanger at the weekend.
I also added the sausages on to my freezer list. I have a built in fridge-freezer so I am devoid of magnet action in my kitchen. Instead I have to make do with a little noticeboard. You can also see my shopping list (with my list of meals planned), plus a freezer life chart, some info on seasonal food and the recommended portions for 5-a-day from the NHS.
I'd be quite interested in a freezer life guide i.e. how long you can keep things in the freezer for from Love Food Hate Waste. I'm not sure where I got my list from but I do remember it was pretty hard to find/put together.
With my sausages I had mash using the potato and sweet potato leftover from Sunday. Now, clearly you can't have mash using the skins of potatoes. Thus the idea of generating food waste was a real possibility here. "What did you do?", I hear you cry. Well, thanks for asking. What I did was to gently fry the peelings in the fat from the sausages. As they were cooling I doused them liberally with salt and paprika. They, my friends, will be a tasty savoury snack tomorrow.
I quite fancied toad-in-the-hole, but after a long day, some culinary "playing around" with some batter rather than simply going down the traditional route seemed appropriate. I divide a portion of batter in to three. The first portion had grated apple (peel on, so no waste), parsley, sage and seasoning added (that's on the left). The next batch received the remaining grated apple and a dessert spoon of muscavado sugar (on the right). The remained was left unadulterated (they're in the middle and yes, I'm clearly not very good at dividing batter into three equal parts!).
This gave me some interesting savoury options for dinner and an opportunity to try out sweet Yorkshire puddings, which I've heard about but never tried.
To finish off dinner, I'd defrosted a portion of braised red cabbage over night, so bunged that in the oven to heat through as the Yorkies were cooking.
In terms of portions, I'd normally just bung everything I'd cooked on to a plate and eat the lot. Resulting in no food waste, but a very fully tummy. Not exactly a bad state of affairs but maybe not the optimum state either!
Thus I just dished out what seemed enough red cabbage and mash (which was a serving spoonful), safe in the knowledge there was more if I was hungry. Turns out that was more than enough food for me. The leftover cabbage and mash have been refrigerated and are prime candidates for lunch tomorrow.
Just a quick note on the flavoured Yorkshire pudding - very good but needs a lot more cooking because of the apple (I think). Will give you the recipe and verdict on the sweet ones tomorrow.
Having consulted the Perfect Portion Tool, 3 heaped tbsp (approx. 80g) and 2 heaped tbsp are the recommended portions of cabbage and mash respectively. So it seems that I eat way more than this usually and only be thinking about food waste have I prevented my self from over-eating: an unexpected bonus.
It would also be really helpful (as I think I've mentioned before) to know the un-cooked i,e, raw weight of a portion to help mew prevent cooking too much in the first place.
Anyway that's more than enough for today, on to the most important thing:
Grand Food Waste Total:
ZERO
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