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Zero-Waste Chef
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Top Posts & Pages

How to Prevent Your Sourdough Starter from Taking over Your Life
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Sourdough Pancakes
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Recent Posts

  • Online Sourdough Starter Workshop Lottery
  • Bake Sourdough Bread Without the Expensive Tools
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  • Lockdown Cooking: 7 Humble Dishes from Staples
  • Hunkered Down During COVID-19? Make Something.
  • I’m Quitting Plastic. What Do I Do With My Plastic Stuff?
  • Will the Coronavirus Kill the Zero-Waste Movement?
  • How Does Recycling Work and Should I Bother?
  • How to Keep Caring
  • Vegan Sourdough Pancakes

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Language is powerful . We’re not social distanci Language is powerful . We’re not social distancing, we’re keeping physically apart from one another. We’re not cooped up inside, we’re staying safe at home. We don’t have a flour shortage, we have a supply chain glitch (suppliers are adjusting production over to retail from restaurants to meet increased demand). Change the language, change your mindset. . I hope you’re all well and safe. We’re in this together. We’ll get through this together.
I thought I’d bake a loaf of sourdough zucchini I thought I’d bake a loaf of sourdough zucchini quick bread this morning. As I gathered my tools, I realized that my mom doesn’t have a vegetable grater 😨 I did find a vegetable peeler though so I used that to peel thin ribbons of zucchini and then chopped those up with a knife. Problem solved! . I really do miss my kitchen tools back in California but I think I’ll let some of them go when I finally return. . I’m sorry I don’t have a recipe for this loaf. To make a sourdough quick bread, you can add 1/2 cup of sourdough discard to the batter and cut roughly 5 1/2 tablespoons flour and 2 1/2 tablespoons liquid from the original recipe. You’ll have to play around with the proportions. . My mom really likes it 😄 . I hope everyone is hanging in there!
It’s an online sourdough starter class lottery! It’s an online sourdough starter class lottery! . A few people have contacted me over the last couple of weeks, asking if I would teach an online sourdough class while we’re all hunkered down at home. So, I’ve decided to teach a starter class this Friday, April 3rd at 4pm Eastern Time. I’ll teach this free workshop on Zoom and am limiting it to 16 attendees. The class will last about half an hour. . If you’d like to join, please go to my blog (link in profile) and fill out the form at the bottom of this post (it’s short—name and email only). Please do not leave your information here because 1) I can more easily track your entries in one place 2) I need your email to send you the Zoom link and 3) you wouldn’t want to post your email address on here. . I’m predicting a high demand for the 16 available spots, so to make this fair, I’ll randomly pick the 16 attendees from everyone who asks for a spot between now and Thursday at midnight, Eastern Time. I’ll send the 16 attendees the Zoom link early Friday morning. . You’ll need to bring a handful of items to the class but not many, basically flour, water and your favorite jar. The list of equipment and ingredients is on my blog. If you don’t have a scale, you can still make a starter. I don’t have a scale with me right now either 😮 It’s fine. . Eleanor (my starter) says hello 👋
My recipe for simple dishes: combine one part dear My recipe for simple dishes: combine one part dearth of kitchen tools with one part avoidance of grocery stores. Add what’s on hand, sprinkle with a dash of creativity and you’ll come up with some tasty meals. . For yesterday’s cooking-in-place dinner, I made a large pot of bean and tomato soup with only a handful of ingredients my mom had in the cupboards. My mom says she can’t stop eating it and just now had a big cupful for breakfast. She added a bit of brown sugar to hers. Yummy! . Here is the basic recipe: . • 2 cups dried navy beans (or whatever white beans at this point), soaked overnight • 3 tablespoons olive oil • 1 large onion • 5 cloves garlic • 1 sixteen-ounce can of tomatoes (I used whole but crushed will work also) • 1 teaspoon salt or to taste • 2 teaspoons brown sugar or to taste (optional) . 1. Drain the beans and rinse well. Set aside. 2. Sauté the onions and garlic in olive oil over medium heat until softened. 3. Add the canned tomatoes, including the juice. Crush the tomatoes with the back of a spoon if whole. 4. Add the beans, salt, brown sugar if using, and enough water to cover by about half an inch. 5. Cook, covered, for about 45 minutes or until the beans are tender. Do the 5-bean test. Taste 5 beans. If all 5 are done, then the soup is ready. 6. Add salt to taste. . If you have other vegetables, like celery, carrots or potatoes, chop them up and toss them in. We are down to onions and garlic here 😨 . I haven’t cooked with canned tomatoes for almost a decade. I’d prefer my frozen roasted tomatoes back in California or home-canned tomatoes or fresh tomatoes 🍅 I’d prefer a lot of things right now! But I’m not going to the grocery store until I absolutely have to. That means I’m using up whatever I find and making do as I #StayHome. We’re eating well! . I had tomatoes left over from this (I opened a 28-ounce can) and so used them to make pizza sauce. I sautéed about 6 cloves of garlic in 1/4 cup olive oil, added the tomatoes, crushed them up a bit, cooked that down into thick sauce and added salt to taste. The sauce tastes very good. I started the sourdough pizza dough this morning for it. . What use-it-up meals have you come up with?
More fermenting in place. . I brought a kombucha S More fermenting in place. . I brought a kombucha SCOBY with me on my trip to Canada because of course I did. . A SCOBY is a culture of bacteria and yeast that you add to sweetened tea to brew very tasty and very inexpensive kombucha. I had planned to give the SCOBY away but have to wait until we can all safely go out and socialize again. And that day will come! Until then, I’m brewing at my mom’s. . My mom doesn’t have any large jars but I found this glass dish in a cupboard. It just fits four cups, the amount I usually make. It needed a “hat” to keep out impurities, so I carefully put the filled dish inside one of the clean homemade produce bags that my daughter left here for me. The dish is about as wide as the bag is, so the fabric is very taut and not touching the surface of the kombucha. . I don’t have any flip-top bottles here for a secondary fermentation but we do have a bottle of wine so after we polish that off, I’ll clean it and fill it with kombucha. I don’t have anything to flavor this batch with but plain kombucha tastes delicious. And once it’s ready, it may be the most delicious batch I’ve ever made. After a few weeks of drinking water or tea (or a bit of wine) only, I really look forward to something effervescent. . If you don’t have a SCOBY and want to brew kombucha, you may be able to grow one. I have done this with my homemade kombucha and many people have told me that they have successfully grown one with store-bought. Pour a couple of inches into a jar and cover it securely with a cloth. Within a couple of weeks, you should notice a thin film on the top of the surface. Wait for it to thicken to a few millimeters and use that to brew. . Link in profile for kombucha FAQs.
This may not be my most beautiful loaf I’ve made This may not be my most beautiful loaf I’ve made but it’s one that makes me very proud. . I came to Canada 🇨🇦 in early March to see my mom. I had finished writing my book, took a couple of weeks off from events and had planned to relax for a bit. Now, I am sheltering in place here in Ontario for a while. I don’t want to travel (I’m not sure I can, with the US-Canada border closure) and I don’t want to leave my 87-year-old mom all alone. . Fortunately, I always travel with my sourdough starter, Eleanor. I also brought my kombucha SCOBY, Etheldreda. (She dislikes the spotlight, so you don’t see her on here nearly as much as Eleanor.) This is my first lockdown loaf that I’ve baked up here. . The reason this loaf makes me so proud is that I have hardly any tools to work with. I baked this on a cookie sheet, not in a $300 Dutch oven. I proofed it in a bowl lined with a flour-dusted towel, not in a $25 banneton basket. I don’t have a scale, a lame for scoring, measuring spoons or even a glass measuring cup here. There are no rubber spatulas or dough scrapers in sight and I certainly don’t have a grain mill. But I’m making it work! My mom does have a bread knife though. And an oven. . So if you think you need all kinds of expensive equipment to make sourdough bread, you don’t. Of course these tools make baking it easier and they are definitely nice to have. But if you’re just starting out, and you want to jump on the sourdoughing-in-place bandwagon, you can make the bread without all the stuff. . If you don’t have a scale, you will need measurements for the three ingredients (yes, just three) by volume, not by weight. Link in profile for those.
How to help with the N-95 mask shortage. . The bes How to help with the N-95 mask shortage. . The best thing we can all do for health care workers and everyone else is to #stayhome to help slow the spread of the virus and relieve the strain on our hospitals. If you have hoarded N-95 masks or know anyone who has hoarded masks, please get those to a health care worker. You can also call your elected representatives and demand that they make personal protection equipment (PPE) a priority for health care workers. . You can also sew. Homemade masks are a last resort but they can help prevent an infected person from spreading the virus and many health care workers have reached out to the public asking them to sew masks. . Sewing will give you something to do at home during lockdown. If you have the basic skills to sew produce bags for your vegetables, you’ll be able to sew masks. . Latest blog post: "How to Help with the N-95 Mask Shortage." More info on all of the above in the post, plus links to patterns, a link to info on fabric types and a link to a very active Facebook group, Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies, where you’ll find posts on what people are making and posts from health care providers reaching out and asking for equipment. . Link in profile for the blog post.
A sourdough baby boom is underway! . The Instagram A sourdough baby boom is underway! . The Instagram stories I’ve been seeing are filled with newborn sourdough starters, loaves of bread and piles of pancakes. Thank you to everyone who has tagged me in those so I can see them. It gives me a little thrill every time I see your new starters. I feel like a sourdough midwife. . The names you choose never fail to put a smile on my face: Edna, Yeastie Boys, Pam Beesley (because she has a beeswax hat), Penelope, Pablo and Phoebe (twins), Lady Bird, Edeltraut... I know my Eleanor would hit it off with all of them 😃 . The proud parents of the starters you see here are: @beccagetspucked @ratatoeskri @plant_based_mommas @changemagnate @climate_action_mataro @itsv.e.r.o @tiffanynoelf @numack_art @sustainablesamantha . I hope that this group photo of just some of the starters you’ve all proudly shown off gives you a sense of community. Even though we’re self-isolating and separated physically, our offline and online communities are unified. We’re not alone, this period will come to an end and we will get through it 💪 . Link in profile for starting a starter.
I’d like to introduce you to my friend and truly I’d like to introduce you to my friend and truly wonderful human being, Rob Greenfield. . If you’re looking for a source of positivity in these difficult times, please follow @robjgreenfield. . Rob is a voice of calm—and inspiration. He has dedicated his life not only to simple living but also to helping others, be it through raising awareness about food and other waste, donating 100% of his media income to grassroots nonprofits, teaching others in his local community how to grow their own food and much much more. . Rob is always working on something inspiring and he recently wrapped up an ambitious project. For a year, ending in November 2019, he bought no food. He grew and foraged 100% of what he ate, all while living in a city in his tiny house—and not on a sprawling farm. Half of his food came from his garden—he produced 100 different kinds of food over the year!—and half came from foraging. . Rob set out on this project not merely to sustain himself, but also to empower others to sustain themselves and build self-sufficiency and resilience. We can rely on ourselves—and our communities!—more and the industrialized food system less. That doesn't mean each of us must go all in and grow every morsel of food that we eat. But even thinking about growing a tomato plant can open up a whole new world and shift our mindset. . So, if you’re looking for a source of light in your Instagram feed, please follow @robjgreenfield. He will inspire, empower and uplift you.
Enjoy a good book while you hunker down. . I start Enjoy a good book while you hunker down. . I started Johnathan Safran Foer’s latest book, “We Are the Weather,” last week and highly recommend it. In it, Foer asks, if we really do acknowledge the fact that the planet is heating, why don’t we change our lifestyles? . One (of many) gems from the book: “When a radical change is needed, many argue that it is impossible for individual actions to incite it, so it’s futile for anyone to try. This is exactly the opposite of the truth: the impotence of individual action is a reason for everyone to try.” . Every individual action matters as COVID-19 is showing us in real time. We can all help flatten the curve and reduce the speed of the pandemic’s spread. So please stay safe, stay home and read some good books. I know this is a very difficult and stressful time but we’re all in this together. . What are you reading?

Upcoming Events

  • San Mateo City Earth Day Event April 25, 2020 at 10:00 am – 12:00 pm San Mateo Public Library, 55 W 3rd Ave, San Mateo, CA 94402, USA
  • Sourdough Bread Boot Camp May 2, 2020 at 9:00 am – 1:00 pm
  • Zero Food Waste Workshop, Dublin May 3, 2020 at 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm
  • Sourdough Bread Boot Camp May 9, 2020 at 9:00 am – 1:00 pm
  • Rainbow Grocery Produce Bag Giveaway May 16, 2020 at 10:00 am – 2:00 pm Rainbow Grocery, 1745 Folsom St, San Francisco, CA 94103, USA

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