This happens to us - if I cook dinner for everyone, two of us eat, if I cook dinner for two of us, everyone wants to eat. If I make enough for leftovers, nobody takes them to lunch. If I don’t make enough, they ask why there is not enough for lunch.
Things that help on your question though -
Canned beans, canned tomatoes, canned coconut milk, canned pumpkin, jarred spaghetti sauce, spices - a lot of our staples are not perishable.
Do you live where you can stop by the store on the way home? Then don’t buy perishables for the week, buy them for the meal you are making.
Some foods and meals freeze pretty well, freeze them and keep a list of what’s in the freezer so you remember to eat it.
I hate meal planning but it helps a lot. I sometimes put a note on the fridge “we have food for dal with spinach, chicken & cabbage, sheet pan gnocchi with sausage and broccoli, eggs and potatoes” or whatever we have the food to make, and cross them off as they are made.
Some foods make other foods. So if I make a hunk of pork, it’s pork, rice and beans then enchiladas then burritos, and so on.
My SO has ADHD and used to do this. I just cook for the both of us now so it’s less food waste. The only issue is sometimes he doesn’t like what I make :/
I just hunt and eat the homeless. I work for the municipality so I just leave what I don’t eat around park benches, bus stops and the front of stores to scare the rest away.
I do this sort of thing with pets from the animal shelter
Clean-up is what stops many people. Get a good titanium no-stick pan - I like “Our Place” pans. Get individual portion meats or frozen meats or buy bulk and freeze in portions. Do the same with vegetables. Heat your seasoned pan up then put some oil in just before you put meat in. Cook meat until almost done, then add vegetables to same pan - heat them up. Serve. Let pan cool while you eat. Refrigerate left-overs. Rinse and wipe pan down. Wash dish. DONE.
My problem isn’t that I don’t use what I buy, the problem is that I buy too much. Like the recipe I need calls for one stalk of celery, but I can only buy an entire celery plant, like 11 stalks in a bundle because that’s all the store offers. What do I do with the remaining 10 stalks?
Keep them in the fridge. Find other recipes that use celery. It’s quite versatile and keeps for quite a long time in the fridge! A lot of French recipes call for mirepoix (celery, carrots, onions; all diced) and Italian dishes call for soffritto which is the same thing. A ton of soups and pastas use mirepoix/soffritto as a base.
Now get out there and cook some celery, carrots, and onions!
That’s your Mel planning, although I’d eat celery by itself.
For example I just bought a bunch of fresh dill because I needs it for one recipe. However I found a side dish that also used dill. Then the next morning I made bagels and lox with fresh dill, and successfully used it up.
I have a harder time with spices and sauces: so many sitting on my counter because they don’t fit in the spice cupboard. However at least they last a bit, giving me more chances to finish them
What do I do with the remaining 10 stalks?
Kindling for the fire
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A slow cooker helps. You can use random ingredients before they go bad easily enough, and you will have left overs so cooking one time results in not having to cook for multiple meals.
I got a chest freezer for $200. I freeze everything before or on its expiration date.
Sometimes if its mushy veggies I make a stock and freeze it for the next meal. If its too far gone i have a compost jar in the kitchen and a bin outside.
I started a garden and an edible native hedge this year. I have tea herbs and squash for free now and working on a seed propagation.
I started a coop mushroom grow with my neighbors since he felled some hardwood and I had the plan. The leftover mushrooms we dont eat will be either sold at market or made into liquid cultures.
Were talking about going in on a local half cow or pig. He says if my garden keeps growing we can buy the plot behind us together and start a farm. Would cut grocery costs a lot.
My wife and I have pantry weeks where we dont go grocery shopping, we eat whats in reserve, soak dry beans, thaw last weeks on sale chicken breast and pressure Cook em, make a flatbread and have some curry.
Instant pot helps too. Thinking about getting coturnix quail to feed good scraps to and get eggs out of. I can plant cover crops for em on the last strip of lawn I have.
It doesn’t have to be wasteful forever.
with pen and paper
Start with just one recipe. When I first was getting into cooking I was buying too much making it overwhelming to open the fridge and decide what to cook. As someone else mention shoot for having leftovers. One recipe scaled for 3-4 meals that you can split into containers and throw in the microwave when you are hungry.
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Consider therapy or medication.
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Buy nonperishables in a higher ratio, such as canned, pickled, or dry goods.
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If you’re not concerned about your health enough to cook your own food every day, then just don’t buy food that has to be cooked every day.
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Remind yourself why you’re doing it, set a timer, and get it done. “This is for me. I love good food, I love my body.”
- Food prep. It maybe cuts down on variety but you only have to cook once. The rest of the time you’re just warming something up.
I second food prepping. If you want more variety, separate some of the prepped foods from each other so that you can mix and match.
A thing that has helped me a lot is to go buy food when I’m not hungry. It reduces my chance of overeating and buying lots of food, also making me spend less money.
When I used to cook a lot for myself in uni it helped a lot to plan meals.
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If you don’t have a good sized freezer, buy one. There are small ones that fit in any home.
Too many veggies? Chop them up and put them in quart sized containers. You can add them to any soup or stew.
I have a five quart pot; make chili/stew/soup and freeze in pint size containers.
My house has a good freezer, here’s the first i searched out as an example.
Accept that you won’t make the food and just buy fast food instead of both. It isn’t as good as cooking yourself, but it will cost less overall.
There’s a middle ground that I think a lot of people miss, and that played an important role in me eating out less.
You can buy things like frozen dumplings, frozen pre-cooked chicken, etc… This isn’t going to be as cost efficient as making from scratch, but it’s wayyyy better than eating out all the time.
I’ve been learning to cook by weaning myself off of ordering out, to frozen pre-cooked stuff (that you should never grow 100% out of, my god dumplings freeze so well), to scratch.
An important dubstep of that has been taking something like pre-cooked dumplings with a homemade soup. It’s like buying level2 ingredients, something a little closer to human readable.
Sorry this edible just kicked in, I think I got lost in the metaphor in that last paragraph.
I was counting the frozen/canned/easy prep in the meme’s “never cook, a lot of it’s wasted” step.
I like dubstep too but I’m trying to figure out what word was supposed to be in “An important dubstep of that,” unless there’s some alternate meaning I’m unfamiliar with.
And to add to what you said here, check out the meal services that send you fresh ingredients to cook a meal. Find one that has a discount for getting started or whatnot. Don’t feel compelled to buy last the discount period or whatever, but it can be a nice way to familiarize yourself with cooking without worrying about compiling ingredients. I’m pretty happy with my kitchen prowess, and with our assortment of spices and whatnot, but there’s still times when I look up a recipe and it’s like, huh, I don’t have that one ingredient and it’s a big deal. The meal kits avoid that altogether.
Planning.
Freeze your fresh bread and only defrost the amount that you’re going to eat.
Meal plan. Write what you’re cooking for the week, buy only ingredients for that.
Anything uncooked goes in the freezer, you can defrost and cook/reheat a lot of food, stop throwing stuff away.
Problem is that some of us have freezers the size of matchboxes, so it is very limited what leftovers we can put in the freezer. It’s something I have attempted to tell my parents who have big freezers and lots of good ideas to how you can buy this and that in bulk and just freeze it for later and save so much money!! Cool. But my freezer is still the size of a matchbox.
That doesn’t stop you from Meal Planning ahead and only buying what you need for that week.
And leftovers can often make great soups, stews, and curries. They can last in the fridge for about a week.
Sure, but I just wanted to point out that some of us do not have freezers that can store a lot of food. Whenever I see people being like “just freeze the leftovers” I look at my freezer like “how?”. If I put a bag of beans, a bag of ice and some springrolls in there, it is filled to the brim.
People shouldn’t assume that everybody have tons of space to store perishable foods. That’s all.
In my household we usually go for small packs of food when we shop groceries. Meats and vegetables etc. We go for small sizes because we don’t want to end up throwing out food. It’s not cheaper, but it is less wasteful in the long run.
I gave multiple ways to reduce food waste. You only responded about the freezer and clung to it, you’re still talking about it. If you have your own method to not waste food then this post and my comment aren’t about you, stop playing the victim.
I’m not playing victim. I’m just pointing out that some people have tiny freezers.
Then use any other of the methods suggested, stop going on about freezers!
You really do not have to be this aggressive, my dude. I don’t have meal planning issues, I just wanted to bring up one aspect of meal planning that doesn’t always work for everybody.
People work with what they have, I just wanted to mention the thing about freezers because people tend to always assume that everybody has a lot of freezer space, which isn’t the case. That is all. No need to get all bent out of shape over it.
I have a reasonable sized freezer, not a huge one, but I feel like if I put a bag of ice in it I’d have very little space. Ice cube trays will leave you with more room.
Very true! It does feel like playing tetris with that little box sometimes, haha.
This is valid and identifiable!
Protip: Save up, buy a dedicated freezer. Like a “redneck hunter’s garage” style one. Nothing fancy, just a white box with a dial on the front for how cold you want it. Cheaper than the fancy flashy fridge freezer combos, and much more usable space (although you have to stack stuff inside). A lot cheaper than you’d expect. They also come in a variety of sizes, from small to “I need space for three bodies”.
Awesome. Where should I put it? I live in a small apartment. My kitchen is the size of a shoebox.
Pro tip
Move to a bigger house
Can’t afford it atm. Not everybody is rolling in money xD
Pro tip: earn more money
What a wonderful community this is.
If you have space for like a bedside table, or a coffee table, or even a table table, you have space for a small chest freezer. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in the kitchen.
Looks like the average small ones are only about 3.5 cubic feet. I’ve rarely seen 1.2 cubic feet ones as well.
That said, if all you have is one of those small kitchenettes with barely enough space for a microwave, you’re kind of kneecapped in terms of food prep in other ways as well.
Drawback, you’ll likely have to defrost those regularly.
Defrosting isn’t a big deal. I decide what I want to eat tomorrow, I take it out the freezer and put it in the fridge, by the time I want to eat its defrosted and good to reheat.
Edit: ignore me, I was thinking of defrosting food not defrosting the ice build-up in the freezer
Pretty sure they mean in terms of scraping out ice that can build up on the walls of the inside.
Oh of course! Now I feel dumb.
I’m lucky my freezer has some anti-frost thing built in so I haven’t had to yet, but yeah my old freezer was a pain for it.
