My dearly hilarious friend Hannah Brandes just posted a lovely entry about the challenges of wasting food because as single peeps it's hard to eat things fast enough, or at least to plan for one person-sized meals without polluting the planet with extra plastic. So, i thought I would share the few lame attempts I have at this! If anyone has better or easy ideas please comment!!!
1. Keep your bread in the fridge, not on the counter. I go through like 1.5 loaves a month maybe?!
2. When you buy fresh/raw chicken breasts go home and individually freeze them for later use one or two at a time. There is a TON of salt in the 10-pack frozen chicken packages.
3. THIS IS MY MOST FREQUENTLY USED TRICK - When you make a dinner freeze half of it for later, or make a meal and divide it into separate containers and then freeze it!
4. Eggs...hmmmm, buy the 6 pack ones.
5. Veggies, those are really hard, but I think it is better to have them in the house and waste 59 cents on a cucumber than to not have it and NEVER eat veggies. Obviously, carrots are an easy one.
6. Milk, bananas, cheese (!!!!) - My only suggestion is asking your roommate to sort of trade on/off for buying things like that so you can just eat/drink each others and then sort of take turns buying it! That's what my parents and I do with those sort of items. We love cheese so buy a lot of that - never goes to waste!
8. I think the hardest, but most helpful, thing to do is when you shop plan on buying things you plan on eating – AKA: make a menu. You only have to plan a few meals for a week, maybe even one…but that way you will use the food you have and buy the food you need. If you need potatoes, buy individual spuds, and then PLAN on integrating potatoes into two meals in a week. When I make cousous I plan on eating it with like THREE things that week, or just as my snack…and then it doesn’t go bad!
So, it takes some a combination of creativity, willingness to plan ahead a bit, and willingness to just eat lame meals sometimes :)
Rock on single people -at least we aren't being eaten out of house and home. AND, no one is stealing our favorite foods and leftovers :)
you should write a book on homemaking for singles... it sounds like you have tons of good ideas! You forgot to mention the staple that rarely goes bad though- PB :).
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