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Zero-Waste Chef

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Turn Trash into Treasure (and Inexpensive Props)

Posted on November 27, 2018November 28, 2018by The Zero-Waste Chef
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The zero-waste journey will change your perception of trash I have been on the lookout for photo backgrounds for months, maybe longer. I’ve checked out expensive wooden cutting boards and pricey marble pastry slabs and giant pieces of natural fabrics but I can’t bring myself to buy more new stuff. I’d feel silly buying a […]

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Sourdough Bread
Sourdough Discard Pizza: How to Sourdough-ize a Recipe
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Fermented Salsa
Is My Sourdough Starter Dead? Your Starter Dilemmas Addressed
Sourdough Discard Vegan Chocolate Cake
Make-a-Dent-in-Your-Discard Sourdough Pita Bread
Sourdough Measurements by the Cup (or Why I Use a Kitchen Scale...)
A Fermented Bloody Mary
How to Prevent Your Sourdough Starter from Taking Over Your Life

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This pic of my starter Eleanor comes from the reci This pic of my starter Eleanor comes from the recipe “Start with Your Sourdough Starter” in my book, The Zero-Waste Chef, out April 13th. I’ve included a bunch of sourdough recipes in the book and ideas for using up the discard left over from feedings (it’s a zero-waste cookbook after all...).
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Do you have a starter? Please DM me photos of yours and I’ll choose several to share in my Stories. I always love to see pictures of your pets 😊
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The full, updated recipe for starting a starter is in the book. Link in bio for more info and preordering.
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📷 credit: Ashley McLaughlin @edible_perspective
In the US, “best before,” “best by,” “se In the US, “best before,” “best by,” “sell by” dates and so on serve merely as guidelines—the FDA does not regulate these dates. Food manufacturers stamp the dates on packages to indicate when the food will be the best quality, not when the food is no longer safe to eat. These dates encourage consumers to throw out food—and buy more (and bring home more packaging as well). Decomposing food in landfill releases methane gas, a greenhouse gas about 80 times more potent that carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. These confusing best before dates—many of which boil down to marketing tactics—add to these emissions.
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If you’re unsure if you should eat your food—whether it came from a package or you cooked it yourself from scratch—use your senses to figure it out. Give it a look, a sniff, and if it passes those tests, a taste. If it looks, smells and tastes fine, it probably is fine. If it has grown fur, smells off or tastes off, compost it!
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Some good news: A new campaign in the UK will replace "use by" and "best before" dates with "sniff and taste" guidelines in order to reduce wasted food. According to @guardian, “In the first co-ordinated move of its kind involving the food industry, nearly 30 major brands are supporting the 'Look, Smell, Taste, Don’t Waste' campaign being launched on Tuesday by the food-waste-reduction app Too Good To Go."
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Since I became obsessed with cutting wasted food, the flavor of my dishes has only improved. My quest has made me a much more creative cook. Link in profile for 23 simple ways to reduce wasted food.
Citrus zest adds so much flavor to food and, if yo Citrus zest adds so much flavor to food and, if you’ve already bought oranges, lemons or limes, basically costs nothing. Before juicing citrus, zest it with the fine holes of a box grater or with a microplaner. You can also peel off wider strips with a vegetable peeler. 
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When I zest or preserve citrus, I use organic, unwaxed fruit. Some of the (shiny) citrus you see at the grocery store has been treated with food-grade wax to help preserve the oranges, lemons and limes. I’d rather not eat this. I am fortunate to have a lemon tree and so I know those are organic and unwaxed. The oranges, lemons and limes at our farmers’ market are also organic and wax-free.
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Use the zest immediately or freeze it in small amounts. Tiny glass jars work really well--you can freeze the small amounts you’ll use in a recipe. Add the zest to quick breads, pancakes, cookies, cakes, ginger beer, a pitcher of water...
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Link in profile for more ideas to use up citrus peels.
“Did you use kombu?!” That’s what my daughte “Did you use kombu?!” That’s what my daughter MK always asks me if I mention I’ve cooked a bean or lentil dish. If I answer no, she won’t touch the dish.
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Kombu—a type of kelp—noticeably reduces gas-producing raffinose sugars present in beans and lentils, it makes the beans and lentils more digestible and it makes the nutrients in the beans and lentils more available to your body for absorption. (By the way, I don’t always use kombu because MK isn’t usually here.)
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MK soaks her dried beans and lentils with a strip of kombu before cooking. She also cooks the beans with that same strip. When she cooks chickpeas, she’ll add a fresh strip to the cooking pot because she has the most trouble digesting chickpeas.
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I buy kombu in bulk when I’m at @rainbow_grocery. You may also find it in East Asian markets or health food stores.
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Dried beans and lentils are a zero-waste food group. They taste better than canned, cost less than many other types of protein and almost all bulk aisles offer at least a few varieties. If you love beans but have trouble digesting them, try adding a strip of kombu to the pot.
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Link in profile for how to cook dried beans.
"It really boils down to this: that all life is in "It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects all indirectly."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
This is the first produce bag I’ve finished in a This is the first produce bag I’ve finished in about 10 months. 
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My sewing bee has given away 3,034 of the bags since we started sewing them in 2018. Used just once a week, these 3,034 bags can replace 157,768 (3,034 x 52) plastic bags in 1 year. I still use bags that my daughter MK and I sewed in 2011. They last for ages.
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When we give the bags away at the farmers’ market, we don’t just reduce plastic, we start conversations. So many people have said to us things like “I don’t like all the plastic produce bags but didn’t know what else to use” or “I have fabric at home and will make some today” or “May I steal this idea for my farmers’ market?” (Please do!)
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These bags also reduce fabric waste. We make the bags out of donated, unwanted fabric that might otherwise end up in landfill. Most of the bags are plain but we sometimes make scrappy versions like this one. One of our seamstresses makes pillows out of the unusable scraps (swipe to see one), which we also save. (I’m sitting on one of these as I post.)
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Right before Covid lockdowns began, our sewing bee had our last produce bag giveaway at the farmers’ market in February. Since then, some of the seamstresses in our group switched over to sewing masks last year. I REALLY MISS my people and am looking forward to getting together again with them sometime this year.
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Link in profile if you’d like to search for a sewing group or add yours to a map I maintain on my blog. So far, it has 126 groups around the world.
Yesterday, after I posted a picture of a wine cork Yesterday, after I posted a picture of a wine cork recycling bin in my stories, a couple of you asked for more information…
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But first…I know I sound like someone with a problem, but…these corks belong to a friend…honest! They aren’t mine! We can’t refill wine bottles where I live. I think it’s possible up in Napa. I would drink more wine if I could refill wine bottles. At least the bottles and corks are recyclable. We need refill schemes for drinks and any company launching today would be very wise to work that model into its business plan. But this post is about cork…
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Cork is not only recyclable, it’s also renewable and biodegradable. Cork comes from oak trees—some up to 300 years old—most of which grow in forests in Portugal, Spain, Algeria, Morocco, Italy, Tunisia and France. Highly skilled, well-paid local workers harvest cork from the trees without chopping them down. These still-standing trees are then left undisturbed until the next harvest, 9 to 12 years later.
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According to a WWF report, these forests host up to 135 different species per 0.1 hectare or about a quarter acre, which is the size of a house lot. The trees provide shade for the ecosystem, they retain water in the soil and they draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
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Cork recycling companies harvest cork from wine stores—in the form of cork drop-off bins. During Covid, some stores may have shut down their drop boxes temporarily but you can always hold onto the corks in the meantime. My daughter spotted a bin at Whole Foods yesterday (swipe for pic) from The Cork Forest Conservation Alliance. I’ve dropped off corks in the past at a Bevmo near me and at Rainbow in San Francisco. Both of those bins belong to @recorkofficial (you can check the website for a map of drop-off locations). As I said, PLEASE CONTACT THE STORE near you before dropping off your corks in case the bin has temporarily closed. These corks go on to have a second life as shoes, yoga blocks and other goods.
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Depending on where you live, natural wine corks can go in your municipality’s green bin. Contact yours for more information.
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Cheers 🍷🥂
I planted some of my sprouting vegetable scraps ou I planted some of my sprouting vegetable scraps outside this weekend: a parsnip top, a carrot top, all the green onions, the root end of a celery stalk and a few rosemary sprigs, stripped of their leaves at the bottom. These had been sitting in the windowsill in water, some for over a month.
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I hope 🤞 the parsnip and carrot tops go to seed, bringing some volunteer vegetables in the spring. The green onion ends will continue to grow outside. We’ll see what happens with the celery top (I kept one inside for insurance and started sprouting another celery end last week). Rosemary, one of my favorite herbs, is a perennial that I put in many dishes.
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If none of these take, at the very least, these vegetable scraps will return to the soil. Whether you subscribe to scrappy gardening like this or you grow all your own food or you tend gorgeous flower gardens, planting anything shows you have hope for the future. Our very long, very difficult winter will eventually give way to spring and renewal. Hang in there.
We may never reach the zero in “zero waste” bu We may never reach the zero in “zero waste” but that’s no reason to take zero action.
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I posted this a couple of years ago but I think it’s worth repeating, especially at the beginning of a new year when many people are trying to stick to resolutions or intentions (zero-waste or otherwise).
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Don’t let the zero in zero waste intimidate you. The zero merely represents a goal and reducing waste isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. If you prefer, call the lifestyle “low waste” or “less waste” or don’t label it at all.
Overnight steel-cut oats. . Ordinarily, steel-cut Overnight steel-cut oats.
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Ordinarily, steel-cut oats take about 30 minutes to cook on the stove. Reduce your energy consumption by making them overnight.
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Before bed, bring 1 cup steel-cut oats, 4 cups water and a pinch of salt to a boil in a covered pot. Turn off the heat immediately. Your chewy and filling steel-cut oats will be cooked by the morning. Reheat, add toppings such as fresh or dried fruit, nuts and nut butter, seeds, yogurt, maple syrup, and so on. This serves 2 to 4 people. That’s really all there is to it but for the full recipe, go to the link in my profile. 
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Watching the storming of the Capitol yesterday was disturbing and doom scrolling all day, exhausting. But we still need to eat and take care of ourselves. If you’re stressed by the news, maybe turn off the news.
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Stay well, everyone.
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