OREGON!
We just moved to Oregon, and it has been amazing so far. I am so excited to check out the farmer's markets (though most are only open on Saturdays... pooh!) and I live walking distance from an all-natural, mostly vegan, locally owned, mostly-locally supplied grocery store! Today I bought local strawberries from Oregon and rhubarb from Washington (which isn't that far, right?) and I'm going to make a (you guessed it!) strawberry-rhubarb pie this afternoon. The homemade pie crust is chilling in the fridge already!
From just our first week in Oregon, I already have a couple No Waste success stories to share (yay!), along with a No Waste fail. :(
Let's start with the No Waste fail: I baked a dozen vegan oatmeal chocolate chip muffins the other day, and the two of us couldn't eat all of them, so I put a couple muffins in a container and labeled it with our mailman's name and a note saying what they were and thanking him for delivering our mail. But he didn't take them! Maybe it's against policy, or he has a food allergy or something, but what a big, fat WOMP. I felt like I was doing something nice by offering baked goods to someone instead of wasting them (and he could've left a note saying why he couldn't take them!), but c'est la vie. We ended up eating the muffins ourselves, guilt-free, and they were DELICIOUS. The mailman missed out!
Now, for two great No Waste successes:
Our neighbor is wonderful. She's so nice - she's lent us gardening books, lets us use her gardening tools, and provides friendly conversation for us when we're lonely because we don't know anyone. So I've taken to bringing her a few of our baked goods whenever I make them, and she is super grateful, and I love that even though I only know a couple people in this whole city, I can still share the food I can't finish myself!
An even cooler success story: my girlfriend was at work the other day and met a man who farms in his backyard. He said he had a ton of lettuce in his garden, too much for him to eat himself, so out of the blue he gave some to her! Isn't that great? The only problem is - now we have way too much lettuce ourselves!
Lettuce is seriously a repeat offender, as far as wasted vegetables go.
So I cut the bottom of the head of lettuce and stuck it upright in a container of water (really, this is the only way to keep your lettuce fresh- treat it like flowers!). When it freshens up a little, I've got to figure out a way to use it all up. I've heard you can throw it into stir-fries with all the rest of your veggies, but I can't think of "lettuce stir-fry" without imagining slimy cafeteria slop.
I'll keep y'all posted on how I figure out how to use up all our lettuce. I'm thinking lettuce wraps? Maybe we should just replace all bread/tortillas with lettuce wraps till we finish up the entire head - healthy AND eliminates waste! I'll also give y'all a peek at the yummy strawberry-rhubarb pie once it's done! I'm using a recipe from Vegan Pie in the Sky, as usual.
See you soon!
