Kitchen Kapers kind of disappeared because:
1 - I think six months of documenting the food we eat is quite enough for now ( I do love the six months worth of Project Life pages I have created in the process). I'll do it again in another few years to see how things have changed. Perhaps Jasmin will be regularly cooking meals, perhaps Eliza will be learning to cook more dishes, perhaps Dave will learn how to cook (LOL), or perhaps food replicators will be invented by then (probably more likely than the previous comment)!
2 - I started to forget to take pictures of the food we ate. Dave remembered more often than me!
3 - My meal planning kind of "fell off the wagon" a bit, OK, maybe a lot!
So, I am now back to planning the meals, but I find myself rethinking my methodologies for meal planning and purchasing as things have changed around here a bit.
Many of you know that I used to plan up to 5 weeks in advance - this meant that I could shop once every five weeks - NICE!!!! Means that you can also buy things in bulk and doing shopping once every five weeks is better than doing it every week, right? There are a couple of disadvantages to this approach though:
1 - We don't really have enough "Spare" space to store five weeks of groceries
2 - Things get put all over the place (eg. the garage, the back of the cupboard or freezer) - and sometimes you just can't find that thing you thought you bought!
3 - We really just don't have enough freezer space (a nice big Chest freezer would be great - but I have nowhere to put one anyway!)
4 - You still have to go and get the fresh food - fruit, veggies, bread, milk and so forth (this we solved by doing it through Aussie Farmers).
I say - if you have the space - doing a shop once a month is the go! But, it's not working for me now - so therefore I have to change.
I now work 10 minutes from home, which means that if I leave work on time, I have a spare 30 minutes in which I can actually "pop" into the big supermarkets (Aldi, Coles and Woollies) to pick up what I need for the week on the way home. This is a luxury that I have not had before. I have gotten back onto the meal planning wagon again - so I know exactly what I need.
That leads me to my point - last week I cleaned out my fridge and cupboards. Yes, I know, amazing! I threw out all the out-of-date food, I cleaned all the shelves, and I actually organised the fridge and cupboard back into some semblance of order. I must say that I was disgusted with the amount of food that I threw out! What a waste! My parent's never wasted food, probably why we had to sit at the table and eat everything on our plate before we got to leave the table. Now I'm not suggesting that anyone these days should do that - I personally think it leads to over-eating, obesity and an inability for people to stop eating when they are full. I'm all for the girls trying a little of everything on their plate, and not overloading their plates to start with - afterall, they do have smaller stomachs.
So what did I throw out? There were a few offenders -
1. Unused Fruit, Vegetables and herbs
2. "Special" purchases
3. Pre-made jars of pastes, conserves, sauces and dressings.
4. Left overs.
5. Bread and rolls.
So my new thing is about food wastage and how I can reduce it. We waste a huge amount of food in Australia. Did you know that we waste about $5.2 Billion in food? That 47% of domestic waste is food and green organic waste, and food waste in Australian landfills is the second largest source of methane – a gas 23 times more harmful than CO2 from cars. All these stats come from this document which I found on the Secondbite organisations web-site.
So why the food wastage and how do I fix the problem?
1. Fruit, Veg and Herbs - We purchase a weekly fruit and vegetable box from Aussie Farmers - the quality of the fruit and vegetables are great, it represents value, and I like supporting Aussie Farmers. The problem is that I get food that we don't eat or use - I can't eat a bag of carrots a week, we don't eat a lot of potatoes and onions, the girls don't like mandarins, and I often still need to buy ingredients I need for some meals. I want to continue to support Aussie Farmers, but I am time poor and don't have time to go to the Farmer's markets. So I have decided to stop the delivery of the boxes, but purchase the items that I need from Aussie Farmers instead. It's costing roughly the same amount of money - but I'm getting what I need, and I can feel better that I'm not throwing out a heap of uneaten food.
2. Curb Dave's "Special" purchases - ie. jars of special preserves, lollies and so forth. Instead of buying 5 jars of special stuff, perhaps only buy 2! For example - jars of special jams from IKEA, he doesn't even eat breakfast - not sure when he was planning to eat them? Anyway, I had to throw most of them out.
3. Jars of pastes and so forth - I will make my own pastes, dressings and sauces. Benefits - they don't have preservatives in them, you can make just the quantity you need, and for the most part they will taste better. Way too many jars of Indian pastes were found in my fridge, they were still in date, but had furry stuff growing in them. Also - we are only going to have 1 or 2 preserves going at a time, and will only purchase new ones once these are finished. I think I threw out about 6-7 jars. Dave no longer eats breakfast, and Jasmin has them intermittently.
4. Leftovers - some foods just aren't suitable for freezing. As a result you put them in the fridge so that you can eat them later on, except the next night you generate more left-overs, and the cycle continues. My solution to this one is to cook less, try to cook what is required, so there are no leftovers, and if people are still hungry they can have a yoghurt or some fresh fruit to top them up! Also, if there are left overs, use them in another meal. Prime example is Corned Silverside - my girls love it, but we can't eat the whole silverside in one night. The last time I cooked it, I made the left-overs into a soup the next night.
5. Bread and rolls - there's only so much leftover bread you can freeze before you run out of space! Once again I was getting fresh bread and rolls from Aussie Farmers. I was getting a delivery of bread and rolls every week. Only problem was that the girls go on and off bread and rolls, so sometimes you get left with almost a full loaf. My solution was to just cancel this regular order and just buy whatever is on special at the shop as I need it.
So - every so often now you will see a blog post about things I have put in place to reduce food wastage and food going to landfill. I am also keen to get a compost bin - so perhaps over the Christmas Break I'll go and buy one, and start composting all the food scraps eg. peels etc.
I finish this post with a picture of my newly organised fridge. I am so much happier, now that it is all organised. I spend way less time trying to find things, and therefore my food prep time is reduced :-)
Di :-)
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