Cooking for less food waste

I really do like to cook, but I get frustrated by all the ingredients I often end up wasting. So lately we've been trying to come up with loose menus that let us make at least two dishes from the ingredients we buy. It's kind of a fun challenge.

Last night I went to the grocery store to get the ingredients I would need to make one of our all-time favorite dishes - Polenta Lasagna.  We love this recipe so much, we even gave it to the caterer and had it made for our wedding. It got rave reviews. I was psyched to have it for dinner last night.

I came home from the local little divey market and started unloading my canvas bags; sorting the dinner ingredients onto the messy counter. Green and red peppers, baby portabellas, yellow onion, garlic, fresh mozzarella, tomato sauce and..... no polenta.  Blast! I had forgotten the POLENTA for the polenta lasagna. Genius.

Oh well. I just made the lasagna without the polenta and layered it on top of some whole wheat gnocchi instead.

Veggies in the pan

To reduce my food waste without the hassle of composting, I'm saving up all my veggie cutting scraps in a bag in the freezer to make veggie stock eventually. I'm getting excited because the veggie stock bag is almost full! Soon soon soon I will be cooking my garbage into a tasty veggie soup base!


These went into the freezer with the other scraps.

While the "gnocchi lasagna" was simmering, I decided to go ahead and chop up all the rest of the veggies I had brought home. I'm definitely on the lazy side, and wanted to set myself up to have no excuses not to cook again this week. And tonight when I came home hungry and cranky, I put together a version of another of our favorite accidental recipes: pizza with purple potatoes, onions, and dried dates. We usually put goat cheese on top, but I used the rest of the fresh mozzarella from the lasagna attempt instead:

delish!

The potatoes and dates add a fun sweetness and "meatiness" to the pizza, and our typical goat cheese balances it out with some bite. The mozzarella version was good too, just milder.

Most of the "buy for one meal and make 4 more with leftovers" ideas are meat based. It's tougher to do with veggies, I think, because the "main ingredient" often doesn't keep quite as well as, say, a roast chicken. But I'm trying to gather more ideas.

My friend Jenn just shared these two great sustainable food blogs with me, and they have been really fun to read:
http://realfoodrehab.blogspot.com/
http://littlelocavores.blogspot.com/