Little House of Ady

Hello everyone ! Welcome back ! Over the last years, I’ve been working on reducing waste and so on in our kitchen. To be honest we didn’t really have that much waste occuring my whole life. But still I wanted to improve things as there’s always something to improve. I’m perfectly conscious that not everyone can do as much as we do, for many reasons, but it doesn’t mean no one can work on reducing one’s waste. I’ve also realized over the last few years that despite our efforts on almost everything, especially in terms of food and so on, we couldn’t totally erase waste. Why ? Simply because no matter what we do, we have to deal with something important, something we cannot erase: Even if there’re some wasteful household (I know some), the great majority of food waste comes from supermarkets and other big structures. Did you know that a supermarket can throw away every week tons of food, food still good to eat, not expired food, and that they’re forbidden to even give it ? I’ve learned about that a few years ago and I found that disgusting. Mass media and governments are constantly talking about people starving in the world and how we have to help them and yet there’re laws promoting all this waste instead of giving food to those in need !

So, unfortunately, despite one’s efforts, we have to face the fact that absolute zero-waste (or even decent zero-waste) cannot be achieved as long as big firms, multinationals and so on keep doing things the way they do. And we also have to remember that it is not true when we’re told that population are wasteful and should change. It’s not true, some parts of the population wastes, I agree, but it’s nothing compared to how much big firms waste. So it’s important that we all slow down on feeling guilty about waste.

There’s no need for us to feel guilty. The only thing we have to do is to be careful and not dive into huge waste and try everyday to improve, little by little.

That’s the reason why I would like to share with you some of my tips, some of the things I do everyday to avoid waste as much as possible in my kitchen and when cooking. Of course, not everyone can do exactly the same as me, not everyone lives in the countryside like me, with hens, rabbits, a vegetable garden and so on. We are all different, we have all different lives, so take whatever is the most useful to you, the most achievable depending on your situation. Everyone has his own pace to do things. 😉😊

Let’s get started !

I decided to put the different tips following the “grow-store-cook-after” process. Of course if you don’t grow vegetables and fruits, “grow” get replaced by “purchase”.

#3 Store veggies and fruits into baskets. This way they’ll breath and last longer.

#4 Store cabbage, carrots and lettuce in the fridge.

#5 Store potatoes in darkness and freshness.

#6 Store food into aluminium or glass boxes and jars (bamboo is great too).

#7 Keep paper bags to wrap sandwiches, to store potatoes, carrots and so on.

#8 Keep leftovers in the fridge into glass boxes and jars for 2 or 3 days until reusing it for another meal.

#9 Store in bottles stew’s juice and other cooking juices, to reuse it later for other dishes.

#10 Use a yogurt maker (with reusable glass yogurt jars). This way, no more need to buy yogurts in the grocery shop and no more plastic/cardboard pots going to the trash.

#11 Use a bread maker. This way even less paper/plastic bag overflowing.

#12 Use leftovers to make new dishes. We have a “recipe” at home (not really a recipe though), wich consists in mixing different leftovers in the wok with some spices and sauces (we call it the “dog soup”). Sometimes you have different small-amount leftovers and you don’t know what to do with them, so mixing them together into a brand new dish might be a good option.

#13 No overcooking. It’s good to have to enough to eat on the table, but no need to exagerate. If you cook too much, you’ll have bigger leftovers and so more risks to waste food.

#14 Keep all food scraps (what you cannot eat) both for composting and feeding to the hens, rabbits. Here all our food garbage goes these ways. Everything rabbits can eat, we give to them. Everything hens can eat, we give to them. The rest goes into composting. And compost goes later into fueling our vegetable garden soil. For rabbits, it’s usually apple skins, carrot skins, lettuce and so on. For hens, I mix dried old bread with some cooking juice.

That’s all for my tips. I hope you find them useful. Let me know please, I would love to read your thoughts.

Thank you for passing by and reading my blog. I highly appreciate.

I’ll talk to you soon in a next post,

Until then, take care of yourself ❤

Ady ❤