What Do You Frequently Repurpose

We made a typical Venezuelan Xmas dish on Saturday and Sunday. It involves a horrendous amount of work and prep,but seems like some are suckers for punishment.
Anyway - lots of corn dough left over, along with pork scratchings and a whole back of roasted red peppers.
The dough was made into arepas - for those of you not familiar, it´s a cormeal patty, filled with something like pulled pork, or ham & cheese, or chicken & avocado, and a staple food for millions of Venezuelans. Some of the pork scratchings were finely diced and added to the dough.
The red peppers , along with two stray slices of ham and half a pot of "half & half", were turned into a pasta sauce, which fed two of us for lunch.
 
Non-food repurposing:
Sometimes I forget to take my re-usable grocery bags and wind up with a boatload of the cheap supermarket bags.
I save those up and use them as packing material for boxes that I need to mail, works very well and then the recipient of said box can reuse them as well.
Say to line small trash cans (which we do in our house) or I'll use two bags together as a garbage bowl, so to speak, when I'm cutting up fresh, whole Cantaloupe or Pineapple, etc. The rind/skins and seeds/guts of that item go neatly into the trash (no, I do not have a composting set-up).

Food repurposing:
Leftover steamed White Rice - I leave in the cooker's pot in the `fridge for a few days to dry out and then it will morph into Fried Rice, MMM!
When I make Meyer Lemon Curd, I save the Egg Whites in individual zip-top baggies and they will go into DH's scrambled Eggs or Omelets: I replace 1 whole Egg for 1 Egg White, SSSHHHHH! He claims to dislike Egg Whites. 😊
Now that there are three of us in the household (we moved my Mother in with us 4 months ago-long story 🙄) I rarely have leftovers, and if there is a stray tidbit of something or another, it usually disappears magically during the course of the day.
 
kaneohegirlinaz said:
Sometimes I forget to take my re-usable grocery bags and wind up with a boatload of the cheap supermarket bags.
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Lots of countries have now done away with single- use plastic bags issued by supermarkets. I can clearly remember the Republic of Ireland (Eire) being one of the first back at the turn of the millenia!

Australia joined that list a few years ago, so now on the rare occasion that hubby forgets out own washable produce bags, the vegetable bags (made from sugars I think- they are very biodegradable designed for household compost heaps) now serve as small bin liners.

Aparently some 127 countries have a range of bans in place from total bans on all single use plastic - not just bags (including drinking water being brought into the country by tourists fresh off a plane), down to preventing shops from giving them to customers.
 
Three years ago G's son and family went to Hawaii. They had a suit with a kitchenette. They went shopping for staples. The stores do not provide bags of any kind. Bring your own shopping bag. I wish all states adopted that policy.
When I shop for produce I do not use the flimsy, plastic produce bags. The veggies go into my basket without a bag. I have numerous reusable fabric or mesh grocery bags. They usually live in my car. If I forget my bags the plastic grocery bags are used as bathroom waste basket liners or catch bags for cleaning the Kitties' litter boxes. I love shopping Costco but I hate the excess packaging.
City wide recycling is a boom. When the recycling program first started I was amazed at the volume of recyclable material compared to the volume of actual garbage/trash.
 
ElizabethB said:
The veggies go into my basket without a bag.
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We use these. They call them weigh bags.
We use them in-store and veg is stored in them in the fridge. They are a fine mesh so no need to unpack and no sweaty veg. They wash (when needed) on a normal cycle. They are actually made from recycled drinks bottles - those single use ones! The picture makes they look small- they are not. They'll take a large heads of broccoli or upto 2kg of potatoes /onions etc.

76749


Many places now make them but we've always used a company called Onya. We just came across them 12 or 13 years ago and took one of their shopping bags with us when we went off to (try to) cycle around the world. "Kate" as it was named (bought at a folk music concert given by the Yorkshire folk singer Kate Rusby) is still going strong. The shopping bags are made from recycled plastic milk bottles, though "Kate" being an early one is made from recycled parachute material.

I was delighted to find them for sale in Australia as well as the UK.
 
SatNavSaysStraightOn said:
I rarely if ever actually have leftovers. If I cook for 1 meal, we eat what I cook and I'll scale what we cook to fit that meal.. If I'm cooking for 2 days, then we simply divide what's cooked into 2, one for each day and divide again. i don't cook "aimlessly". If I'm steaming veg, we simply steam only what we can eat.
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Lucky you that you know how much your partner will eat! Mine is totally unpredictable. Sometimes he eats a child's portion and sometimes he will eat two adult-sized helpings. I never know which that will be until I am finished cooking.
 
rascal said:
We recycle glass jars and bottles. I just threw out one that the lid rusted through that's been used for the last 15 years.
Food doesn't get a chance to recycle :)

Russ
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I recycle jars, too. I have glass jars that I use for beans, barley, rice, and pasta. It's a great way to store the remaining portion of a box of whatever and keep it airtight so it doesn't get stale. It also looks nice in my cupboard and it's easy to see what's what.

If I make a turkey, I can make turkey sandwiches, turkey soup, turkey and dumplings, turkey mac n cheese, and so forth for a week until the bird is gone. We had a pork tenderloin roast one night that I served with potatoes and veggies and the next night I made pork fried rice. The following night I made pork tenderloin barbecue sandwiches.

A lot of times leftovers end up in a potato breakfast hash the following morning.
 
JAS_OH1 said:
Lucky you that you know how much your partner will eat! Mine is totally unpredictable. Sometimes he eats a child's portion and sometimes he will eat two adult-sized helpings. I never know which that will be until I am finished cooking.
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My husband was one of 4 sons in a typical Lancashire working class family. They all cycled to work, they all did manual labour jobs. They ate everything in their plates, seconds and dessert. They ate what they were given period.

We've always been very active until the last few years, (arthritis and age is catching us up) so feeding him is easy. stopping him over eating (now we're less active) is harder!
 
I have used the side rails for pan and utensil hangers in the kitchen. The wood was such good quality I couldn't chop it and burn it on the fire. The rest of the cot will be used as part of a kitchen spice shelf. The house is quite old and stone built so these additions fit in with the general style of the place.
 
SatNavSaysStraightOn said:
My husband was one of 4 sons in a typical Lancashire working class family. They all cycled to work, they all did manual labour jobs. They ate everything in their plates, seconds and dessert. They ate what they were given period.

We've always been very active until the last few years, (arthritis and age is catching us up) so feeding him is easy. stopping him over eating (now we're less active) is harder!
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I saw a pic, he looks good!

My husband works out, he's fit. He needs more calories though, I think. I try to get him to eat healthy snacks because he only eats two meals a day.
 
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