Read aloud in a Brad Pitt drawl: The first rule of food waste is: you do not buy too much food. The second rule of food waste is: you do not buy too much food. In an ideal world—one in which you have time to shop a few times a week at a local farmer’s […]
produce
How to Rescue Vegetables Past Their Prime and Avoid Food Waste
For the holidays, my younger daughter and I drove to my brother Paul’s in North Bend, Washington. At the end of our visit, before we left, I went through Paul’s refrigerator and pulled out some of the produce I had bought up there since he said he wouldn’t eat it (Paul doesn’t cook much). After […]
How to Remove Pomegranate Seeds
Did you know that in the story of the Garden of Eden, Eve would likely have tempted Adam with a pomegranate and not an apple?* I may be projecting my own pomegranate issues here, but I imagine that today’s shoppers, lured by the pomegranate’s alluring pink–red shade, plump pregnant shape and promise of juicy sweet seeds, experience that […]
Fried Potato Skins
Ideally, my daughter would eat mashed potatoes with the skins on. But as I have usually peeled the potatoes, I have personally trained her to expect mashed potatoes with the skins off. I hate to compost the skins and waste them. Fortunately, you can never go wrong with fat, salt and potatoes, even if just the […]
Three Years’ Worth of Produce Stickers
I try to buy most of our produce from the farmer’s market. But occasionally I miss a Sunday or I forget to buy something, so I end up at the grocery store. (I never forget my cloth produce bags though!) A few years ago, my older daughter MK started sticking those little annoying produce tags (never present […]
How to Pit and Freeze Fresh Cherries
My kids love smoothies. They make them with yogurt, milk, bananas and frozen fruit. The other day, when I looked in the freezer, I found a plastic bag of frozen fruit from the grocery store. Ugh! I don’t have all that many rules here. But no plastic is one of them. So, no drugs in plastic baggies. […]
How to Sew Homemade Cloth Produce and Bulk Bags
I’ve been diligent about using cloth shopping bags for literally decades now (I bought my first cloth bag in 1988). But until recently, I rarely used cloth produce bags. I’m all for plastic bag bans, but we need to address the plastic produce bag issue—those things generate huge amounts of plastic waste. So in 2011, when […]