Dealing with food waste; when life throws you carrots, make carrot-raisin salad and carrot-cake.

This month has been designated by the Crunchy Chicken the month of the Food Waste Reduction Challenge. Notice the badge on the sidebar?

I always have the best intentions of incorporating more fresh fruits and vegetables into our diet, buy them on sale, and then ... mostly what happens is that Em cooks supper several days in a row and I forget all about the food I'd bought that's been sitting in the refrigerator for ... well, for example, No. 2 flew down to attend No. 1's wedding shower in April of 2009 (last Spring) and I bought some spinach/artichoke dip for her to eat while here. She's a vegetarian and I wanted to be sure to have something besides peanut butter/jelly sandwiches in case she got hungry ... except she preferred peanut butter/jelly sandwiches to that dip and we just got around to eating it this week. No kidding.

I found a ball of homemade pizza dough on the freezer door and a container of that hot pork sausage that Em likes on his pizza. I didn't have any bell peppers or onions, though, and I like my pizza to have SOME vegetables. We had a 2-lb bag of carrots that I think I was gonna use for the baby shower last month, but Dave's mom made so many food dishes that whatever carrot dish I was gonna make got changed into something else that filled the few gaps left ... so I asked Em if he'd like carrots on his pizza. His face contorted into what I took to be a "NO!", so I thought, "Well, that dip has spinach and artichokes in it at least" and spread it onto the pizza dough. Worst thing that could happen was food poisoning, right?



Em had made spaghetti (with no veggies) the night before, and there was some sauce with ground beef left, so I put that on next.



Rest was pretty standard fresh ingredients and the pizza was quite good although it stuck to the pan a bit (which had more to do with not enough oil on the pan than old ingredients).


We both woke up the next morning feeling fine, so NO food poisoning! Makes me wonder if that dip was actually a food or more like a twinkie.

So, Diane was blogging about making a carrot cake and I thought, "I wonder if they use any carrots?" and it turned out they did and Em likes carrot cake (oh happy day), so I looked around for some recipes that didn't involve 12 cups of sugar, and found some capable of being tweaked to lesser amounts without losing the taste or using artificial sweeteners. I had a plan for the carrots.

The next day, Em said, "So, you want to get rid of those carrots?" Thinking he'd found a new public dumpster, I said, "I want to USE the carrots." He said that his very favorite salad is carrot-raisin if I could find a recipe for that on the web. With Google as my friend, I was able to make


and



from



and Em liked BOTH very much.

Tomorrow I see what I can do with apples and cantaloupe on their last legs.