According to a recent USDA study, Americans waste 1 pound per person per day at the household level. Now I basically live and breathe waste. I would like to insert the word figuratively into that statement but with plastic pollution in our water, our air, our soil and our food I cannot. Even with my crossed-the-borderline […]
food waste
15 Creative Uses for Food Scraps
Last week I rewatched Anthony Bourdain’s documentary Wasted! The Story of Food Waste in Berkeley on the big screen and spoke on a panel after the film. Anyone who eats should see it. (You can read my review of it here.) The chefs in the film came up with such creative dishes from food that […]
The Lemon Sorbet of Compromise
My daughter Charlotte started feeling sick Friday. As I left for the grocery store to fill up on supplies for my sourdough bread boot camp workshop, she asked me to bring her back sorbet, or sherbet or some other frozen dessert other than ice cream to soothe her throat. I said I would look. In […]
Lemon Curd
If you glance at my Instagram feed at the moment, you can easily surmise that lemons have come back in season here in Northern California. So far, I’ve started a few jars of preserved lemons, made fermented lemonade, started lemon extract, and last night—at 2am—made the lemon curd in this post. And took the pictures. […]
Lemon Extract
I feel as though have a part-time job at the moment finding uses for the lemons that our tree rains down upon us. If I had more than one lemon tree as prolific as this one, I would lose my mind. Or I would list the location of my trees on Falling Fruit, a site […]
Freestyle Cooking: Stir Fry
Before cooking dinner, if we home cooks first examined the inventories of our pantries and refrigerators and used what we found there to make a meal, we would slash food waste in the home. Our great-grandmothers did this. Today, many of us choose what to eat based on our whims—or our picky eaters’ demands! Let’s […]
Doggy Approved Puréed Bone Treat
Before I start this post, let me point out that I am neither a vet nor a dog nutritionist, if that’s a thing, which it likely is because where I live, we have not one but two dog ophthalmologists (that I know of). I don’t have a dog. I had hoped my cat Bootsy might […]
Pumpkin Dal
This dish came about from a what’s-on-hand-I-need-to-make-dinner-now moment. I always have red lentils in the pantry for dal, I had some fresh tomatoes on the counter and I had about a cup of homemade pumpkin purée left over from making pumpkin pie. The previous week, I had attended a Hindu funeral and devoured a most delicious curried […]
Labneh (aka Yogurt Cheese)
I mentioned my labneh in a post last week but people had questions on social media about it so I thought it deserved its own post… If you’ve gone plastic-free and zero-waste and still want to eat cheese, trying to find it may drive you over the edge. Where I live in Northern California, I […]
Take Food Waste Off the Thanksgiving Menu
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), over the 2016 Thanksgiving holiday in the US, “six million turkeys—a value of roughly $293 million—ended up in the trash.” Producing that much discarded turkey “requires an estimated more than 100 billion gallons of water (enough to supply New York City for 100 days). And when it […]
Kitchen Science for Kids: Food Waste Audit
Most young kids understand—better than some adults—that we have only one planet and so should preserve it rather than trash it. Curious and inquisitive, they are also natural scientists. In this kitchen science for kids lesson plan, your kids will learn about food waste—why we waste food, what else we waste when we waste it, […]