Friday 31 October 2008

Waste Free Week Days 2-4

After my mammoth posting sesh on Tuesday I though I would let you digest all that exciting info before posting again!

So here is an update of the last few days...

Day 2

I managed to make some sandwiches before leaving the house this morning, so a waste free lunch was easy to achieve. A few fruit peelings and cores will be composted at home. Tuesday evening I made mushroom and spinach risotto, using up the stock from the night before. All of the chicken bones and soggy veg from making the stock has been put in my bokashi bin to pickle before being put into my compost bin. Bokashi bins are a great way of dealing with cooked food waste as they accept all meat, dairy products cooked and uncooked food. They work by utilising tiny microbes in a bran that you add to the bucket, they anaerobically break the food down, creating an odourless product that can then be added to a compost bin, or buried in a flower bed. The microbes are great for soil and encourage wormy activity!

The only near call to waste was when I finished the end of my risotto rice packet. I would usually throw this in the bin, but this week that's not an option so I will be sending it to local company Polyprint. My portion control wasn't very good and I used far too much rice! See day 3....

Day 3

Today I had the munchies. I really wanted a chocolately treat, but fought the urge to buy a chocolate bar. Instead I baked some cookies! They are sooooo easy and delicious! So that took care of that! We had waste free sausages and mash for dinner, using up the final dregs of stock for the gravy. All peelings made it safely to the compost bin! The leftovers from last night's dinner were eaten at lunchtime so no food waste has been created again!

Day 4

Today could create a problem for me. I have to come up with a costume for my aerobics class tonight. If we dress up in Halloween fancy dress for the class our instructor, Julia Thaxton, will donate half of her fee to Breast Cancer Care. Well I couldn't let the side down so I had to find something. Luckily the shop I went into mainly packaged it's items in recyclable cardboard, so I bought whiskers and ears and went as a Witch's familiar! Unfortunately there was a little bit of plastic film packaging around the whiskers, but I'll add that in with the risotto pakaging for Polyprint. Now I'm sure someone will tell me if this is cheating, but my friends kindly cooked us dinner after my aerobics class, so I don't know if any waste was created... They are very keen composters so I know any fruit trimmings will have been taken down the garden, but as for packaging? I don't know. I'm going to have to find out though aren't I?

2 comments:

Almost Mrs Average said...

LOL - now I would have loved to have been to that aerobics class. I think I might have to dress up for every session to cope with the exercise :-D

Anonymous said...

When we eat at friends' houses, we just eat what they serve. We justify this because when they come to our house, we serve waste-free meals, so we figure it evens out. I don't want people to get all stressed and feel like they can't serve store bought crackers when we come over. I do notice though that people think about what they are serving us and often voluntarily tell us about the packaging choices they made.