I’ve know people (who came through the depression or were refugee immigrants) who say, “I never waste anything in the kitchen.” Heck, Jacques Pepin says this.
I’ve not mastered the task of not wasting food. I live alone and haven’t figured out how to buy/cook for one. I buy what I think I’m going to eat, but wind up throwing things away, stuff that gets moldy, or spoiled, or I just don’t want to eat. I’d probably do well to go to the store every day and buy just what I’m going to eat that day…but then I’d still wind up wasting things.
How do you deal with this situation, especially if you’re shopping/cooking for one or two people? I’d like to find a system that works.
I feel incredibly blessed to live where I can buy anything I want any time I want and have enough to pay for it. (That wasn’t always the case for me.)
I have a big freezer, and I use it a ton. In fact, I have 3 freezers - the one in the kitchen, another one in the beer/soda fridge, and the full-size one, and they’re always full. I find that keeping little bits of things not only cuts down on waste, but it’s an excellent way to make throw-together meals. That last bit of meat from the chicken I cooked a week ago cooked up with the leftover enchilada sauce I froze last month and fresh tortillas and veggies is a quick dinner. Or everything gets thrown in a pot for soup. Really, it’s easy to use things up if you are a little bit imaginative with your cooking. There’s no reason you can’t throw that extra tomato sauce in a meatloaf, or combine the leftover chicken and steak in a burrito, or throw the leftover carrots in with the mashed potatoes and you now have fancy mashed root vegetables instead.
I’ve also learned to NOT buy the big size, even if it’s a better value, because I end up throwing it out.
Also I tend to use leftovers as lunches. Last night’s dinner = today’s lunch.
It’s not easy cooking just for two either! I use those green bags to stretch the life of produce. I freeze a lot of portions. Make sure you use containers made for freezing to avoid freezer burn. I tend to make meals in batches, cooking every few days and eating the same thing for a couple days in a row. It’s tempting to take advantage of larger sizes which are cheaper per unit, like milk, OJ, butter, cheese, but we can never use it all before it goes bad so we pay for the smaller sizes.
I send leftovers with my husband for lunch and eat them myself for lunch. I also don’t make too much food anymore- I used to use a 9x11 for lasagne- too much food! Now I use a bread loaf pan, just right for dinner and 2 lunches. I have a small crock pot so I don’t make a gallon of chili and waste it because I don’t freeze it right away, thinking for some reason that I’ll want to eat chili for the next 5 days. I plan our meals several days in advance so I don’t buy produce I’m not planning to use.
We’re not perfect, though. I made a chicken stew last week that was just meh and we didn’t eat the leftovers, so I’ll throw them away today. But that happens less than it used to.
There are only the two of us.
We usually cook as if there were 10 of us.
We plan to cook on weekends.
Good plastic containers and a freezer - that is the trick.
Very nice when coming home from work during the week, too tired to make anything and just yank something out of the freezer and either microwave it or pop it into the oven or re-heat on the stove.
Currently we have a ham/cheese/potato casserole in some containers, some pasta sauce, a frozen quiche (I made two), stuffed peppers and I think there is a pasta alfredo with chicken in there. Any one of those could be ready to eat in probably an hour or less (depending on thawing time, if needed.)
In other words - plan on making more, then immediately put the leftovers in the right size container for use later. Obviously for you, that would be several smaller containers instead of one large container.
There are some tricks to avoid freezer burn, but that is another whole thread.
I used to have a big problem with cooking a lot of something, then my partner and I eating some, and the rest sits in the pot until it goes bad. And when my partner wasn’t here, I’d take the whole pot into the living room and eat while I’m watching TV . . . usually finishing all the food. This is an excellent way to gain weight.
What I now do is this: Cook the same amount, but put away the leftovers right away, and never eat an entire meal while watching TV. This saves food, and promotes weight loss.
I feed the 3 of us, and I deal with this problem too. The kids aren’t huge eaters, or adventurous ones–although they’ll eat whatever I make, they won’t eat it enthusiastically or want to make leftovers the way I might.
I try to freeze what I can. Whatever I would usually throw out can go into compost or to the dogs. It’s still a waste but the dogs are happy.
One vegetarian and one meat eater here… Luckily my husband likes left overs so why I make meatloaf, he eats for lunch and dinner for the next few days. I really feel guilty throwing out anything. ( grew up in a military family in the 60 and early 70’s good thing the commissary was subsidized! I don’t know how my mom did it when dad was on tour x2 in Southeast Asia )
We have a storage freezer. We basically cook huge meals and store 2/3 of it to make 2 more meals for us. We’ve gotten good at figuring out how much to make. I’d say we waste less than 10% of the total over all three meals(that is a guess; it could be more or less).
That is cooking for my wife and me. We also prepare small meals for our kids(both young). They waste more as it is hard to tell what they’ll eat on any night. Still, they eat way less.
When I was first widowed, I threw away so much food, it was insane. Once I had to literally carry the crisper drawer of the fridge out to the trash, because everything I’d planned to make into salads had liquified. I stopped trying. I bought quick stuff to take to work for breakfast and lunch, and went to salad bars or buffets for dinner; anywhere I could sit alone and read while I ate. It ended up actually being cheaper.
Waste the food. You aren’t going to intentionally buy more than you need, you’ll have what you want and some will be left over. It’s not a crime, you’re keeping people employed, and food is bio-degradable. And if it still bothers you and you don’t have any grown kids of your own, I’ll send mine over to your house and they’ll make sure you have nothing left over.
We have a food saver vacuum sealer. $79 for a cheap one and they work great. For dinner earlier this week, my wife took out some pulled pork I made last month. One thing led to another and we didn’t eat dinner, so today, I made a 9X13 pan of smoked pork and green chille enchiladas and vacuum packed those for lunches.
A single co-worker and I sometimes trade leftovers. It’s new to you and saves you cooking a meal.
A strange thing that was happening to me was I couldn’t keep enough tuppermaid containers clean for all the leftovers. I went to Smart & Final (restaurant supply chain) and bought a huge sleeve of Chinese take out boxes. I split up leftovers into single servings, grab one on my way out the door in the morning, then toss it after lunch.
Try cooking things that can be morphed into something completely different so it doesn’t seem like you’re having the same thing over and over. Pot roast -> stew -> pot pie. Or I make a sloppy Joe recipe that’s Italian flavored, I mix the leftovers with cottage cheese and mozzarella and use it to stuff manicotti or shells. This could be a whole 'nother thread maybe.
When cooking only for myself, I mostly cook things that can easily be separated into single servings and frozen–soups and stews are good for this. (Also, I’m very tolerant of eating the same thing a bunch of meals in a row, so I go through leftovers that I don’t freeze before making anything else.)
Some vegetables go bad faster than others after being peeled/sliced–I find cucumbers are particularly bad about this. If you’re making a salad that you expect to cover more than one meal, only prepare enough of the fast-spoiling veggies for one sitting, and add them at serving, rather than mixing them in. That way, they won’t go off and ruin the rest of the salad.
Oh yeah, I had a similar problem when I really started freezing things. I ended up with deli containers from my local restaurant supply store. They’re reusable up to a point, so I don’t feel too bad about using “disposable” stuff, but at the same time, they’re cheap enough that if I don’t want to wash them out, or leave them at someone’s house, or pack up leftovers for a guest to take home, I’m not worried about getting them back.
The only bad thing is that they ARE deli containers, so when you show up at someone’s house with a couple of them full of potato salad for the BBQ they invited you to, they think you stopped on the way and bought that potato salad instead of making it yourself.
Actually, it’s a lot of help. I’m so sorry for your loss. I’m a widow, too. I cooked everything from scratch, because my husband had many health problems. Your solution sounds like a great one for me for now.
