Friday, February 18, 2011

Food Waste...

I've shared before that I really make it a priority to use up the leftovers we have. This hasn't always been the case. It hit me tonight as I was cooking dinner how much I've grown in this area.

You see, last Saturday we had another family over for dinner. The mom and I became fast friends through our MOMYS group and when they come to Richmond, I practically beg for them to come for dinner. The Dad of the family and Brandon get along great and so do our combined eight (soon to be nine because she is expecting in May!) children. It's a wonderful time of fellowship for us.

Anyhow, Brandon grilled chicken and I prepared corn on the cob and baked potatoes. We had cantaloupe for dessert. There was quite a bit leftover (no one leaves my house hungry!) and we had leftovers on Sunday, eating the remaining chicken and potatoes. We still had quite a bit of corn left.

The next day, I heated just enough corn to have as a vegetable side dish with our dinner. And we still had some corn left. I cut the corn off of the cob and froze it.

Thursday, I combined it with black beans, diced tomatoes and other seasonings and we had it over rice, with chicken breasts and greenbeans as well.

At the end of that meal we had rice and the black beans, diced tomatoes, corn leftover.

Tonight, I mixed the rice and the black bean mixture with another can of corn, ground beef, onions, seasonings, beef broth and more diced tomatoes and made a mexican soup. (I also used a small portion of frozen baked beans from the freezer. I mashed them to make the soup broth thicker..)

The rest of that soup will be eaten tomorrow for lunch.

In the past, I would have been sick of looking at corn and I would have wanted something else. At some point, I was convicted and felt that simply wanting something else and therefore wasting perfectly good food wasn't the best use of our God-given resources.

Here's the good news: You don't have to eat leftovers the same way you made them the first time! Sometimes we do.. we call it Leftover Buffet or Mismatched Meals and I let everyone pick a few things. Sometimes we have the leftovers for lunch.

Sometimes they turn into "do-overs" like a casserole or a soup.

But I've decided to be the best steward I can be of even the little things... like a few extra pieces of corn on the cob.

~Stephanie

4 comments:

Tracy said...

Great work! Those meals all sound terrific! :)

Erika said...

I love the creativity you use with your leftovers! I think our biggest problem w/ leftovers (besides me just being plain tired of eating that food/wanting something different) is that it'll often be such a small amount...like a half-serving of green beans...that it's like...what do we do with that? I supposed if I liked a random half-serving of green beans as a snack, then great, I could eat it as that. But it's not enough to incorporate into another meal usually...just enough to be frustrating. Often we'll just feed it to Lola. Does that count as wasting? I go back and forth, ha.

~Stephanie said...
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~Stephanie said...

Erika- save them for soup. :) At any given moment I have a few half servings of veggies in the freezer waiting for a soup! And feeding Lola certainly counts (and isn't wasting!)