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Tuesday, June 4, 2024

Wins and Losses in the Kitchen This Week

In the loss category:

  • about 1 1/2 cups of leftover refried beans that sat for too long in the fridge
  • the liquid from canned beets (good intentions to use it) that developed mold on the surface
  • some two-year old natural peanut butter that was in a container that was pushed to the back of the fridge, with some mold along the edges -- yuk!
  • a container of cornmeal that had bugs. This was gross beyond belief to see those crawly things in the cornmeal. I composted this. Lesson learned -- if I'm not in a cornbread-baking period, keep the cornmeal frozen.

In the win category:
  • a rhubarb and blackberry crisp that I made last Friday, and that no one liked -- so, I cooked it up in portions throughout the week by adding water and microwaving it. It turned into a pretty good rhubarb and blackberry oatmeal breakfast for me. No one else wanted to try this. So I guess, lucky me!
  • the last chunk of a 2 1/2 week old watermelon. The tip of the chunk had gone soft, but the rest was delicious. I had this with my lunch today.
  • 3-day old gravy from a pot roast. It's only about 1/2 cup. When I found it in the fridge on day three, I popped it into the freezer. Then tonight I added it to our vegetable beef soup.

In the part win, part loss category:

  • about an inch off of a cucumber that went soft and slimy. My daughter cut off that part and used the rest.
  • the fatty bits from a pot roast that I made last week. I had intended to render the fat into liquid beef fat to use in cooking. I didn't get to it, but my husband did. He did use the liquid fat in a meal he made for us, then he ate all of the cracklin' bits. I regard this part of it as maybe a loss, as he wound up with a pretty bad stomachache the next morning.
So what have been your losses and wins in the kitchen lately?

8 comments:

  1. I considerate a win that we tediously washed the lettuce and spinach from the garden and ate it before it went bad. That's not always something that we achieve here - especially since my husband is not fond of salads.

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    Replies
    1. Good job on eating all of the lettuce and spinach, Live and Learn!

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  2. Not too many losses lately but one that I can't seem to manage is lettuce. When I buy Romaine they come in pkgs of 3. We can't get through 3 quick enough so I followed a "sure" method by wrapping each in foil but that didn't keep it much longer. Iceberg doesn't last long either so I always end up throwing lettuce away. I haven't found anything smaller than pkgs of 3 in the Romaine dept.
    Alice

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    Replies
    1. That sounds frustrating, Alice. I wish for you that more stores would sell individual heads of lettuce like Romaine.

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    2. My son puts greens of any kind into a soup when they look like they're getting old. That's where I learned I can cook any kind of greens. Of course, it makes sense, but I hadn't thought about it until I saw him do it.

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    3. This is a really good idea, Live and Learn, especially if the greens are pureed before adding, I would think. Lettuce cooks down to almost nothing, but finely shredded or pureed would be a good addition to soup and save that lettuce that is too old to eat.

      I'm now thinking about Gazpacho soup!

      Delete
  3. I no longer buy celery because no matter how hard I tried, I never used it up in time before it turned to mush. We don't really love it that much, so it's not much of a loss.

    We have lots of leftover food from the graduation party and I've been trying to keep that from going to waste. We had a veggie platter, and the cucumbers we got from Gordon Foods weren't in good shape to begin with, but we managed to eat them before they went too bad (all the other food was really good). We ended up with a lot of leftover croissants, so I gave several flats of those away. I made French toast with some of them, and have frozen the rest. It's a challenge to use up food sometimes!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Kris,
      We had the same problem after my daughters' parties. With the second one (a year later), I did a better job of not overbuying. After that first one, though, we had a lot of leftovers. It did make putting together quick lunches easy, though, for those first few days. And we did end up with some yummy treat foods that I froze and could use later. I bet you'll enjoy those frozen croissants at some time later this summer.

      Delete

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