Confess Your Tricks to Avoid Wasting Food

[iggysbabysitter]

I keep an old tupperware 1L bin in the freezer door. Everytime there is a little leftover anything it gets dropped into the bin. When it's full I make "leftover soup" or "garbage soup". With a little creativity it often tastes so good I'm a bit disappointed I couldn't make it the same again. Bits of meat, vegetable, noodle, sauces, salsa, even cheese.

I have 2 pet chickens (silkies) and they clean up meat scraps and veggy scraps, and may someday pay me back with eggs
I have rabbits and quail who eat some of my veggy scraps and give me the perfect compost/fertilizer that I use to grow tomatoes, potatoes, squash, spinach and onions.
I don't feed them a lot of scraps since the rabbits can get bloat from eating the wrong thing, and the beautiful white silkies look dirty and gross if they get greasy/staining type foods.
The silkies won't eat the powdery leftover feed, so I mix an egg in it, add some veggies or leftover potatoe and nuke... they like the lumpy mush. The rabbits are fed an all natural feed, no pellets... and they spill a lot, so the quail tidy up the floor of the spilt grain. No waste.

I made a lot of applesauce, but my kids don't like to eat it any more, so I got a dehydrator to make fruit leather! They love it, and it's not mostly sugar
I found super cheap sliced mushrooms a few weeks ago and tossed them in the dehydrator. I crushed some and left the rest whole, put them in jars. They are great for adding to soup, and they won't go bad if the jar is sealed tight.

[Allis154]

Lets see...

Stale bread products get frozen and made into croutons, breadcrumbs and stuffing/dressing.

There is just 2 off us, and after 15 years of cooking, I can usually get the amounts right for just two of us. Small amounts of left overs are frozen and used in DH lunches.

Any bottles are completely emptied and rinsed with whatever other liquid is called for in a recipe (water/vingar/etc).

Extra sauce from recipes is labeled and frozen for re-use.

Apple sauce is made from apple peelings...Carrot peeling etc go to the hamster.. Water for canned tuna goes to dog and cats...all meat from bones used to make stock goes into the soup that I am making..

Nearly everything gets used...our compost bin(municiple) is mostly..cat litter...kleenx tissues/paper towels and the like, shavings from the hamster and the few meatbones that we have.