Slow start, first dinner

Julie's Organic Sorbet. Yum.

Okey dokey. We're running a little behind schedule due to some foreseen circumstances. Our original plan was to hit the ground running on August 1 with our fridge barren of anything but package-free ingredients. As it turned out, we left town for almost two weeks leading right up to the beginning of the month and despite our best efforts we still have a few perishable, packaged items to plow through.

Maybe that's Lesson One -- getting rid of food packaging can be harder than it seems. Or, there's more hyper-packaged stuff in your fridge than you may realize. After tonight's dinner, we are left with a package of grass-fed ground beef, a blob of mango sorbet, and a smattering of condiments.


We'll get more into the nitty-gritty of this experiment in later posts, but we want to repeat that the goal here is no net kitchen waste. That's more involved than you might think...it's not just about eating our peas and avoiding food waste but also about avoiding producing waste in the first place in the form of ubiquitous-yet-invisible packaging.

Okay. On to the fun stuff. Here's what Audrey made us for dinner last night:

From left to right, clockwise: frosted glass of ESB homebrew, freegan organic butter on homemade carrot-currant-walnut bread, garden veggies salad on fresh mozzarella, and garden kale chips.

This meal met our standard and was a tasty success. As we'll probably reference later, we have calculated that the homebrew is a net waste reducer: we get bulk ingredients (albeit in three or four small plastic bags) from the Reno Homebrewer, reuse our bottles and six-pack carriers, and create new waste in the form of bottle caps. We compost our spent grains and leftover beer muck, reuse our glass bottles, and our beer (probably??) has a lower transportation footprint than bottled beer.

(We'll reach out to the Reno Homebrewer folks in the course of this experiment and try to fill in some of these gaps.)

buttahhh

If you're wondering what "freegan" means, here's a better overview than I can give: http://freegan.info. As you'll see, we get some (but by no means all) of our food from dumpsters and other commercial waste/excess. In this case, we scored more than 30 pounds of organic butter back in mid-February and stacked it in the freezer. We've still got about a third of it left.

Audrey will share her wisdom in the arts of homemade bread, kale chips, and others in a future post. The fresh salad she made was a clever hodgepodge of garden tomatoes (Early Girls), gentle red onion, cucumber, and bell pepper tossed in some olive oil, red wine vinegar, and balsamic. The veggies that were not grown in the backyard were bought at our local Co-Op along with the bulk oil/vinegars.

Now, the mozzarella. We'll have to see if this can be replicated. We did some pre-August recon and found that our local Whole Foods will provide bulk, packaging-free cuts/servings of its delicious, organic fish, meats, and cheeses. This is, of course, easier done with sharp cheddar than with fresh mozzarella. As luck had it, when Audrey showed up with an old cottage cheese container the cheese folk were whipping up a fresh batch of mozz and were able to ladle two mounds of it with the water/juice on the spot. If we try to repeat this, we're gonna have to get the timing just right again or else the cheese will be prohibitively sealed away in a plastic container.


Hopefully this kept your attention enough to warrant further reading. We'll get into the swing of things, work our way through more of those leftover foodstuffs, and add some macro themes to the micro-level analysis. See you then.