Chucking out food

Witzend ?

Apparently it is not good to eat an avocado which has mould on the outside.
I've never seen one that is mouldy and we used to keep them for quite some time in Australia and they were fine.

I would probably only buy one at a time.

We very rarely need to throw food out.

I bin a lot, but I'm getting a little bit braver. We are also trying to be more careful about using things up. I feel very guilty throwing food out.
I don't often buy avocados now as its difficult to know when they are ready to use. I buy M&S smashed avocado which lasts 3 days.

Practically everything in my baking cupboard is technically out of date as I use so little. I have no worries about baking powder, bicarb, gravy granules, stock cubes , unopened tins or jars and much more. I wouldn't dream of throwing any of it out.
Just occasionally I have to throw out part of a cucumber or lettuce, or satsuma, but it is rare.
I usually cook enough stew to freeze one or two portions. Last weekend I made meat sauce from half a kilo of mince and made it into lasagne ( ate two portions, froze three ) , and froze two portions of Spag bol sauce as well. Seven meals in all. No waste there.
We buy a joint from the butcher about every three weeks, eat it freshly roasted, then cold or reheated in gravy the next day or maybe turned into cottage pie, then freeze one or two more portions of sliced meat in gravy. Value for money.

I have just eaten lunch which consisted of a quite passable soup made by mixing two leftovers from recent soups, one of which was thickened with leftover mashed potato. DH had the remainder of last night's risotto and the last piece of fennel.

I had tried a recipe which was a proper saffron risotto, which he said was very nice, even warmed up and an accompaniment of lengthwise sliced fennel. The fennel was fried in a little olive oil, dipped in flour and egg and then coated in a selection of chopped seeds and nuts and fried again. The recipe didn't include egg but I couldn't get the nutty mixture to stick to the vegetable otherwise.

Planning for the week usually means that everything gets used up and I don't buy anything I don't need.

The trick with weekly planning is to leave one day or one meal unplanned as there are often leftovers to be used up at some point.

The only waste with the above meal was some of the saffron. It comes in a tiny plastic container (would hold one contact lens.) I had such trouble opening it and when I finally got the lid off, some of the saffron (ready ground) shot across the worktop and on to the floor. I rescued what I could and the result was still a nice yellow risotto, but it was annoying as it was rather expensive.

I throw nothing away that I've cooked. Anything left over is a snack for MrM following day, or put into a curry or risotto for us both. Small amounts get frozen and combined with something else later.

Compost well past their best veg, fruit and salads. Never compost cooked food.

My problem with avocadoes is the the non-ripening variety. They have been picked far to early. I buy one. it lies in the fruit bowl for about a fortnight, still as rock hard as when I bought it and, yes, ends up on the compost heap.

This is why I have not bought an avocado for years. however its composted remains has long been spread on the veg patch and been consumed in the resultant crop.

They have to be picked at just the right time or else they remain hard. Too late and they could go off.
It could be a problem if they take take too long being transported/stored between farm and going on sale in the shops.

If you want to revive limp lettuce or celery, cut the end off and stand it in a glass of warm water for a while. Magic!

Frozen avocado is good in a smoothie, and no waste.

I made a chocolate cake today, mainly to use up some out-of-date drinking chocolate (August 2016!)
The baking spread was also out-of-date, but only by a month.

We haven’t eaten any of it yet, but not at all worried, it looks delicious.
?(no choc cake emoji)

I don’t often buy bagged salad, because if you don’t use it all fairly quickly, it goes slimy.

However I recently found a use for some that needed using up when it was too cold to feel like salad.
I often make myself a SE Asian style soup for lunch, with ginger, chilli, rice noodles and whatever veg I have. Funnily enough, about a third of a bag of mixed leaves blended in very nicely.

I threw out three jars of homemade rhubarb jam today. They'd got to the back of the jam shelf. I undid the lids to check and gave the surface a poke - and it fizzled. I don't the jam is supposed to do that, so it went on the compost heap.

Mmm, yes Nfk: I think the jam was ‘past it’.

My out-of-date choc cake was good.

As little as possible as we were brought up not to waste food. I see package dates as guidelines and rely on DH's sense of smell to check whether things have gone off. He is a dab hand at making soup so very little goes to waste.

If an Avocado gets a bit too ripe I mash it with a bit of lemon juice, put it in one of those white ceramic small pie dishes and freeze it. Great to thaw out for deli meals when I can’t be bothered to cook.
My husband made pizza last night and I asked him to halve the amount of dough he normally makes as trying to lose weight. Normally there is enough left over for breakfast!
Having home deliveries rather than going out to shop has resulted in less wastage now as i plan and no impulse buying!

We waste as little as possible, feed it to the cats or put it on the compost if possible if it can't be used.

I'm just making some new sourdough starter (the last lot got left too long) and the part you have to discard each day I'm cooking - it comes out like pikelets or thin crumpets - for lunch. I can't even bear to waste that!

I agree with an earlier comment in that I think the only thing I ever throw out is salad. I live alone and if I buy a lettuce like an iceberg, it usually turns brown before I can eat it all, if I buy a bag of leaves I find that goes off even quicker. I find it very annoying but this is probably the only thing that gets wasted in my house. Living alone I can use things that are about to expire and make some weird and wonderful dishes with them as I only have myself to please.

My kids complain that the fridge is always empty! It doesn't seem to occur to them that the freezer is groaning and I own a microwave...

@Septimia - aren't they tasty

The dates on things annoy me. I use my eyes and my nose.....this is what we did years ago....

If I have meat I am not sure about, I give it to the dog...their stomachs can manage bacteria in a way ours can't. If veg goes over and I can't rescue it, I compost it which makes me feel that it isn't really thrown away, just recycled. I am not somebody who will look at use by dates for most things and we try hard not to be wasteful. We often freeze stuff before it goes out of date if we haven't managed to eat it in a timely fashion so our waste is negligible.

I buy bags of small avocados, usually 8 or 10 because they work out cheaper. The downside is that they all ripen at once so you eat more or find that the last ones have gone mouldy. They cost $2.50 or so each but a bag is about $7. I like the small ones better and use them on bread instead of butter or in salads. Hate throwing them out but I am happy to say I have some growing from seeds . I am sure they will never bear fruit but they look nice.

If it looks ok and smells ok,it gets eaten.

I was born in the 60s and my parents didn't have much money so nothing got wasted. My Mum would scrape mould of cheese and jam and then eat it, I won't do that. But very little gets thrown away in my house. I decide if fruit or vegetables are edible by the way they look or smell not by the date on the packet. I freeze anything I can and will sometimes have some very strange things for my lunch just to use up something going out of date. Items in my bin are either moudly or inedible.