Be Green in the Kitchen

One of my favorite challenges is to make something wonderful from what appears to be nothing. My good friend Michelle is really great at that. She has the touch to make things beautiful and aesthetically pleasing without spending much money at all. I think it's a wonderful gift.

I enjoy doing it with the contents in my refrigerator. Truly, I love to clean and organize. My husband teases me because it's to be sure that sometime during each weekend he'll find me on a chair reaching to the top of my pantry or on my hands and knees spraying down and wiping out the freezer. I also live by FIFO. It's a term used in the food industry; First In, First Out. There is usually a sequence to which we use food in our home. If leftovers are present (And I hate eating leftovers. Fortunately Chris is my live-in garbage disposal and he doesn't mind finishing off a pan of lasagna or remaining mashed potatoes.) it is top priority to get rid of them before making a whole new meal with new ingredients. I like to waste as little as possible and try to live by the RRR method of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle even with our eating habits.

To begin with, since there are just two of us, I usually make 1/2 of a recipe or smaller amounts of food. This reduces the amount of product I use. I reuse food that is still in containers in other meals to finish them. Last night I made a wheat pasta dish with veggies; sunburst squash, sun dried tomatoes, peas, and shiitake mushrooms. I also had about 1/4 cup left of pinto beans from a previous night's dish(wilted kale and pinto beans), so I just threw those in for extra protein. Call me OCD, but I feel accomplished when after dinner, I look into our fridge and there are a few containers less than there were before. And finally, I try to recycle as much as I can whether it be empty containers of sour cream, salad dressings, etc.

But back to my main point of making something out of nothing...it's really fun for me to see that we've got random ingredients in our pantry and fridge, to use them and throw something together that is healthy and delicious. That's satisfaction for me. My aunts used to say that my mom could feed a whole house on a chicken for a week. That's what I'm talking about. Making little become much by stretching and improvising and adding. When I've used things up, I reward myself by going grocery shopping and doing it all over again the next week.