Cheap & Cheerful Meals: Using as Much Garden Produce as We Can

Friday's pizza and movie night -- we watched Indiana Jones and the Raiders of The Lost Ark

Friday
homemade sausage, mushroom and basil pizza
orange segments and fresh figs
garden green beans
cabbage and celery slaw
blackberry pie

I can't quite say that I "found" an orange in the spare fridge, as I've known it was there since late last winter. What I did find was the motivation to use the orange. I'd been hanging on to this last orange so I could make a batch of candied orange peel (how I make candied orange peel here). Friday afternoon, I peeled the orange for segments to go with fresh figs in our dinner, then sliced and candied all of the peel. I'd intended to chop and freeze the candied peel for baking with this winter, but we ate it all.

My cabbage has not grown to a good size at all this year. So, I've been plucking off the outer leaves from several heads to slice thin and make into slaw. We will still get some small heads of cabbage, but this way we will get more food from each head overall. The outer leaves tend to be tougher and less crunchy than the inner portion of cabbage. Because of this, I slice the leaves as thin as I can. 

I picked blackberries Friday afternoon for Saturday and Sunday's breakfasts.

Saturday

Saturday
refried beans (cooked from dried beans) and homemade salsa

rice
sautéed kale
cucumber and tomato "salad" (cucumbers with a light dressing and tomato wedges)

Sunday

Sunday

kale and onion frittata

garden green beans

tomato wedges

mashed potatoes

blackberry pie

I picked blackberries again on Sunday for the family's breakfast the next day. At the same time, my daughters picked a large bucket of blackberries to make a pie for us. Our plan is to pick and use as many blackberries as we can for daily meals while they're still good. This will help us stretch out the other fresh fruit that we have coming in or already harvested and stored.

Monday

Monday

teriyaki chicken and garden vegetables, using leftover pickle juice in the marinade

leftover rice mixed with cooked broken noodles

garden salad, using leftover pickle juice in the dressing

fresh figs

blackberry pie

Tuesday -- I promise there's a hot dog under the relish and mustard in that bun.

Tuesday Cook-Out

hot dogs in homemade buns from freezer

kale, apple, celery, pecan, raisin salad in a rosemary-rhubarb dressing (rosemary-rhubarb preserves with mayonnaise)

grilled onions and squash (a winter squash that fell off the vine long before ripening, peeled/seeded, chopped)

blackberry-rhubarb jello 

s'mores

The blackberry-rhubarb jello can be made with any fruit that will gel (these won't -- pineapple, figs, mango, kiwi, prickly pear), stewed, fresh, or frozen. Instructions for making gelatin with real fruit or fruit juice are in this link.  For this batch, I stewed rhubarb and blackberries together until the rhubarb was soft. I then sweetened and puréed the stewed fruit and mixed in the softened plain gelatin. On the plate for Tuesday, it's in squares. that's because I wanted the gelatin to set up quickly, so I poured the mixture into a shallow baking dish. It set up in about 3 1/2 hours.

Wednesday

Wednesday

blackberry cheesecake French toast with blackberry syrup

steamed green beans

tomato, cucumber, cheese salad (in mustard vinaigrette made by rinsing out a mustard jar with vinegar, adding garlic, additional vinegar, oil and salt)

Thursday

Thursday

homemade black-eyed pea, hot dog and vegetable soup

bruschetta toast, using garden tomatoes, garlic and basil, plus cheese on homemade bread

blackberry pie

Other meals

After I baked 3 loaves of toast and sandwich bread on Monday, I baked a batch of blackberry granola. To do this, I mashed a large handful of fresh blackberries and combined with sugar, salt, vegetable oil, and dry oats before baking in a slow oven. My daughter baked 2 blackberry pies this past week. We're trying to use all of those fresh blackberries before the season is over. 

Another breakfast item I baked this week was an apple snack cake. The squirrels had been up to their usual mischief in the apple trees and knocked 4 apples off. I picked those up, washed them, cut off the bruises, and chopped to add to an eggless, milk-less snack cake, roughly following the recipe in this link. I followed the one for the chocolate cake, omitting the cocoa powder, chocolate chips, and vanilla. I added 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves, and 1/4 teaspoon ground allspice, then adding in the 4 chopped apples. It's delicious! I would normally bake an apple crisp to use for breakfasts, but my oat allergy is acting up and I wanted to have some of this.

I also finally got to making another batch of yogurt. I needed whole milk for this, so I had to wait until I went to Fred Meyer for the monthly grocery shopping. Breakfasts were some combination of granola, toast, apple snack cake, yogurt, apples, blackberries, orange juice, coffee, tea, milk, eggs, and peanut butter.

For lunches, I showed my daughter how to make sorrel and squash blossom soup one day. She also put together a couple of quick salads for us and we added tomatoes (most often as tomato sandwiches), apples, raisins, bread, cheese, peanut butter, eggs, hot dogs, rice and beans/lentils, lentil sprouts, and various leftovers.

We are still trying to live as much as possible on what we have at home and in the garden. I did go grocery shopping this week. I'll post on that later. But I will say I bought very, very little produce -- 3 bananas and a handful of jalapeños for making salsa. 

The garden is not exactly winding down, it's changing. The produce items that like the heat are winding down, but the cool weather vegetables and fruit are just getting started. The fall raspberries have just begun this week. I have a few plums, apples, crabapples, green figs (unripe figs), and pears to harvest at the end of the month or in very early October. In vegetables, we still have cabbage, kale, Brussel sprouts, turnips, beets, carrots, spinach, mâche, potatoes, onions, pumpkins, radish greens, celery, and Swiss chard for early to mid-fall meals. Oh my goodness. It's been a lot of hard work with this year's garden, as I've tried to grow as much of our food as I could. Some things didn't grow that well, while others surprised me with their bounty. But I kept working at it as best as I could. The bulk of my work in the garden will be behind me after the potatoes and carrots are harvested the first week of October and I finish making pickles, relishes, and salsa. As odd as it sounds, I'm a tiny bit glad this is an off year for plums. Harvesting, pitting, and drying all of those is a week's work in itself.

Anyways, these were our meals this past week. What were the highlights of your week? Have you made candied orange peel before? What did you think of it? Some folks don't care for it. My family seems to like it. Do you ever make jello with fruit or fruit juice and plain gelatin? Amy D. from Tightwad Gazette fame inspired me to make fruit jello with her description of making blackberry jello with puréed fresh blackberries. Her thinking on using fruit to make a jello dessert was that this would be a healthier way to use up blackberries compared to lots of pies or other baked desserts. My family ends up eating these fruit gelatins as servings of fruit with meals. One can only eat so many pies, right?

Wishing you a wonderful weekend!

A New Path to the Goal of Less Wasted Food

One of the lessons that I've learned from being a mother and a spouse is that when I want to effect a change in behavior in my family members, instead of badgering them constantly, I have much more success if I give that family member some control (and responsibility) for the outcome. I've heard of parents giving the responsibility of paying the water bill to adult kids (with their own money) still living at home, in lieu of paying rent each month. Doing so incentivizes these young adults to get out of the shower faster and not leave the faucet running when brushing their teeth. So when I was handing over some of my smaller regular tasks to my daughters and husband the other week, I was delighted when one of my daughters volunteered to take on managing the leftovers in the fridge. Since (what feels like) forever, managing all things "kitchen" has been my domain, including tracking leftovers.

I say I was delighted because this is an area that both daughters could use a little nudge. This isn't a criticism of either of them. After all, neither of them have experience in tracking the foods that go into the fridge, and thus developing a sort of radar for when to use things up (because they've had me doing just that). But they do generate a lot of leftovers that linger. They're young, and they buy foods they like and think they'll eat, sometimes more stuff than they can realistically eat before spoilage. And they often have evening conflicts, resulting in some or most of their dinner getting put into the fridge. So, although I didn't plan it this way, they or one of them needed to "see" leftovers from the perspective of trying to minimize their build up.

What my daughter has done for us

First, she organized everything in the fridge. It looked great. Of course, within a few days the rest of us have made a quasi-disorganized mess of her hard work already. But she did establish a space for leftovers and bits and bobs that need using up. 

Then she began asking each of us to use these foods or plan future meals around them. She offers suggestions on how these foods can be used. 

Dovetailing with this chore, she also puts together fruit and vegetable items or dishes that we all use in making our own lunches. On days when she's working, she may just tell us what needs using and one of us at home gets these items out at noon. On days when she is at home, she may make a simple soup or pick greens for salad, to which we each add our own sandwich, cheese and crackers, etc. In doing this task, she also checks the shelf in the fridge with items that need using. If someone has leftovers, she's the point person to remind them. 

This has been extremely valuable for our family, not just in making sure we don't waste food, but also in keeping our fridge somewhat organized so we can find things again. And, I've noticed that both of my daughters are using up the foods that they've bought and forgotten about.

Among the items that need using are my many jars of pickle juice, sweet, sour, and some spicy (oops -- guilty as charged). She also found the other jar of dill relish that I couldn't find when we had our Labor Day cook-out. (I opened a second jar because I couldn't find the first.) I was able to finish off the mostly empty dill relish at a cook-out on Tuesday. Also for Tuesday, my daughter had found the chocolate patties leftover from Labor Day. So we made s'mores after the hot dogs.

If I didn't know better, I would say that we generate more food than we can consume, even with me not shopping as often. It takes one person to monitor what is staying in the fridge longer than necessary, or else we end up with a lot of waste.

My daughter's efforts are working with me, too. Earlier this week, I made a teriyaki marinade using sweet watermelon pickle liquid and sour fig pickle liquid. Another day I rinsed 2 caramel sauce bottles out with hot water to add to my afternoon coffee. And today, I rinsed out a near-empty mustard bottle with vinegar and made a bottle of mustard vinaigrette (it dressed tonight's salad). Now, I need to plan a soup that will use up that pasta cooking water from Monday.

Not only have I gained some time for other, beneficial-to-the-family chores, but I can rest assured that the leftovers are being tracked and we're wasting less food.