Don’t want to waste food you can’t finish in a restaurant or toss a to-go container at home? Go for option three: Bring your own container.
BPA
Pumpkin and Spice Sourdough Discard Quick Bread
This pumpkin sourdough quick bread is like pumpkin pie in bread form and, if I slapped a label on it, it could honestly claim “Now BPA-Free!”
Use-It-Up Corn Cob Broth
Vegetable broth made with corn cobs, husks and floss tastes absolutely delicious and contains only the minimal ingredients that you yourself put in the pot.
Coconut Milk Made from Dried Coconut
I make my own coconut milk for several reasons: Store-bought coconut milk is packaged in either wasteful cans lined with plastic or hard-to-recycle and even more wasteful Tetra-Paks that contain plastic Many of these plastics contain BPA or a replacement that is just as harmful Store-bought often contains food-like and suspect ingredients Homemade contains only […]
Refried Beans
Homemade refried beans taste delicious, fill you up, cost little money to make and contain only a handful of ingredients. The taste of canned refried beans pales in comparison and I prefer that my food not come into contact with plastic. The epoxy that lines cans contains either BPA or a just-as-bad-if-not-worse replacement, such as […]
How to Cook a Whole Pumpkin in a Pressure Cooker
Homemade pumpkin purée tastes so much better than store-bought. For several years now, I had been roasting small whole pumpkins to make purée. That works well. Basically, you stab the pumpkin a few times around the top, roast it for about 45 minutes and purée the flesh. You can read a post about that here. However you […]
How to Cook Beans In a Pressure Cooker
Updated 01/27/18 All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. — Noam Chomsky I think the quote above fits well with a post about my […]
How to Freeze Food Without Using Plastic
When I post pictures of my jar-filled freezer on social media, I get lots of questions about it, usually along the following lines: Is it safe to freeze food in glass? (Yes) Do you use special glass for the freezer? (No) Don’t your glass containers break? (Only that one time…) I have had little trouble […]
Kick the Can[ned Pumpkin]
Go here for cooking a whole sugar pie pumpkin in a pressure cooker. I can’t remember the last time I bought a can of food, including canned pumpkin. When we went plastic-free in 2011, we ditched all canned food. Cans are lined with plastic that often contains BPA, which according to the Environmental Working Group, […]
DIY Ricotta Cheese
Click here to go straight to the recipe. You may never buy ricotta cheese again after you taste this. Dense, creamy and delicious homemade ricotta surpasses any store-bought brand I’ve ever tried, and requires only two ingredients and about twenty minutes of actual cooking time. I use high quality ingredients to make ricotta—Straus organic milk […]
5 Ways Reducing Waste Can Reduce Your Waistline
If you have tried to lose weight to no avail, you may want to cut down on your waste rather than counting your calories. 1. To quote my friends at Plastic Free Tuesday, plastic makes you fat. Many plastics contains BPA, a synthetic estrogen. According to Dr. Robert Lustig, the UCSF pediatric endocrinologist made famous by his […]
10 Simple Tips for Packing a Zero-Waste Lunch
Updated 01/07/19 My younger daughter Charlotte returns to school this week. That means homework for her, chauffeur duty for me and what’s-for-lunch panic for both of us every morning. (Update: Charlotte now walks to school and makes her own lunches.) 1. Come up with a zero-waste lunch menu Preparing a zero-waste lunch begins with the […]
How to Make Easy and Free No-Waste Bone Broth
Click here to go straight to the recipe. I used to buy broth. I would use half a container, put the rest in the fridge and a couple of weeks later, empty the remains down the drain. The packaging waste is also excessive, as the photo from Safeway below shows. At Safeway, you can choose from Tetra-Paks or cans for […]
Tomato Sauce from Scratch!
Click here to go straight to the recipe. My coworkers know I don’t use plastic, and so they ask me lots of questions, such as: “How do you wash your hair?” (Baking soda followed by a cider vinegar rinse.) A recent midday email from my boss: “How do you take out the trash without a […]
How to Cook Black Beans
Click here to go straight to the recipe. Updated 01/19/21 Update 07/16: I now have a pressure cooker and cook my beans in that. IT IS SO FAST! Read more here. I don’t eat canned beans (or canned anything for that matter), for several reasons: Cans are lined with plastic that often contains BPA. Because […]