A quick fix and the glory of sandwiches

Sometimes, it's nice to just stop by the dumpster and pick up a few ingredients for dinner. In this run, I ended up picking up broccoli & zucchini for a side dish and enough fruit to make a fruit salad for dessert. Yum!
- 4 pkgs strawberries
- 1 zucchini
- 1 broccoli stalk
- 4 oranges
- 6 apples

Also, when you pick up odds and ends, it's really easy and wonderful to make sandwiches to take with you to work for lunch. I got a lot of pre-cooked turkey breast, bread that I'd frozen, and some tomatoes and greens in a recent haul. It's a nice, healthy way to use up all the ingredients outside of a salad. There's nothing easier than a sandwich!

Baingan Bartha, Bounty, & Food Stamps

Forgive me readers, for I have sinned.  I went an entire month without dumpstering.  How is this possible?!  I'm pretty upset about it.  Still, I think I have some decently good excuses why I haven't been as active in the trash lately:

I moved a few months ago and haven't found good dumpsters close to my new house. I was going to the dumpsters near my work...until I left that job in August (explaining why I didn't dumpster at all in August). 2: Leaving my job allowed for me to get food stamps again (I need the money for non-dumpster-able items like olive oil, etc, I just also started using it for everything else too)...now, I know this makes me a lazy dumpster diver and probably shows you that a big motivation for my dumpstering is saving money as opposed to saving the planet. Still, that motivation is there.
Bottom line is this: I have decent excuses for not dumpstering a whole lot lately. I have some friends who are showing me some new spots, soon, though...so hopefully I'll resume my normal dumpstering routine in no time. Since I got food stamps, I've been taking the leftover amount of funds I have in the account and have been buying dry or canned goods and have been donating them to a food shelter so they don't go to waste (shh, don't tell)! I think a good idea might be to start dumpstering again so that the amount of food I can donate increases (I've also been cooking for starving artist friends a lot lately, so that sort of counts as donating food to a worthy cause too).

July Bounty (really out of date, I know, but:)

7/24/12 – Food Lion

-       Bag of broccoli

-       2 pkgs cherry tomatoes

-       1 red bell pepper

-       1 loaf honey wheat bread

-       2 pkgs kiwis

7/26/12

Tried a new Trader Joe’s during the day – nothing good this time.

7/29/12

Chamomile tea, morrocan mint tea left in a "free" box by co-workers.

 BAINGAN BARTHA



I had gotten really tired of making my usual eggplant dishes: eggplant parmesan, ratatouille, baba ganoush...and then I dumpstered another eggplant.  So, I tried going WAY outside my comfort zone to try an Indian dish out.  I'm really unfamiliar with Indian cooking, so the picture looks pretty gross below.  However, it still tasted pretty good, even if it was a little off from the baingan bartha I'm used to having at restaurants.  Hopefully this is my first and worst foray into the land of Indian cuisine, and that practice will be on my side with this one.

Ingredients:
-  A few cups of brown cooked rice to put the mixture over (pasta will suffice, but will be weirder)
- 1 small onion, chopped
- 1 tomato, chopped
- 1-4 jalapenos (depending on how you like your spiciness), chopped & seeded
- 3-4 chopped garlic cloves, minced
- 1-2 inches chopped ginger
- Olive oil
- Yellow curry powder - optional
- Coriander to taste

Step one: roast your eggplant.  Here's a nice video with instructions here.
Step two: take the pulp and put it in a saucepan with about a tbsp of olive oil.  Add the onions until they're soft, then the jalapenos, garlic, and ginger, then tomato.  Keep at a medium or medium-low heat until you start to smell the aromas mixing together.
Step three:  Add salt, coriander, and curry to taste.
Step four:  Taste and adjust flavors until it tastes right, then serve!

Ingredients not dumpstered or donated: Spices, olive oil

Oxtail Stew & Crock Pot Fears

 

Okay, so I've been a bad mommy to this blog.  I've been out of town.  Plus, I got food stamps and have yet to find a dumpster that feels right now that I've moved again. I feel like there are fewer things to write about since I'm sticking to cooking tried and true recipes that I've already posted and I just haven't been dumpstering as often.

That all said, here's a nice recipe for the fall and winter that involves very little effort. I have to start by saying that I'm terrified of slow-cookers and crock-pots. Some part of me just doesn't feel comfortable leaving the house for 8 hours with a heated appliance on. Horrific fantasies of my house burning down because I wanted to make a delicious stew run rampant. Still, I do OWN a crock pot, so I decided I should try to use it more often. My way of getting around fire-by-soup anxieties is to use my crock pot at night when I'm sleeping (the idea being that I would hopefully wake up if my house were on fire). It turned out really well, and now I'm excited to actually keep trying it out more and more...If you don't own a crock-pot, most thrift stores will have one, or you can just try to cook the stew using a slow (time) and low (temperature) method of cooking on a stove or in an oven with a dutch oven. There are guides for how to do this online.

OXTAIL STEW

First off: what's oxtail? It's the tail of some type of cattle, typically a cow. You can get it for much cheaper than most other beef. In my case, I dumpstered some. It comes out super tough unless you cook it slow-and-low, which makes it juicier and more tender. Also, cooking oxtail with the bone in is great because the bones provide more flavor for your soup or stew. I'll use oxtail when I make a stock for Vietnamese pho - recipe forthcoming.

Ingredients:
- 2 lbs. oxtail
- 1 medium onion, chopped
- 1 stalk celery, chopped
- 2 carrots, peeled & chopped
- 2-4 whole peeled garlic cloves (depending on how garlic-ie you want it) - 3-4 dried ancho chilis, chopped
- 2 parsnips, peeled & chopped
- 1 turnip, peeled & chopped
- 1 bay leaf
- 1-2 potatoes
- 2 cups of full-bodied red wine
- 1.5 cups chicken or beef stock - you can substitute broth or water if you're out
- Thyme, salt, pepper, & parsley to taste
- A few tablespoons of olive oil

The bottom line is, whatever you have in terms of veggies that would taste good in a stew or that is close to going bad - throw it in there! Also, a word of caution about seasoning - since you're cooking for so long, the dish will really have time for the flavors to meld together, so a little goes a long way in crock pot cooking. Also, if you over-salt, it will just dry out your meat and your veggies, so wait until after everything's done cooking to add the majority of your salt.

Step one: Brown your oxtail in a skillet with a little olive oil.

Step two: THROW EVERYTHING IN YOUR CROCK POT. Leave the oxtail, potatoes, and carrots closer to the bottom. Try to get the liquid covering everything.

Step three: Cover it and leave it revved up for 8-10 hours. You'll know the oxtail is cooked when it easily falls off the bone and the potatoes are cooked all the way through. Try not to take the lid off during this process, since that's what's keeping the hot air in that's doing the cooking.

Step four: If you're health-conscious, there can be a LOT of fatty oil involved in this process. A way to get rid of that is to put your stew in a bowl when it's finished and refrigerate. That will coagulate the fat so it will easily be scooped off the top of the bowl with a sieve or spoon after a few hours chilling. You can remove the bones at this point if you want as well. Reheat whenever and enjoy! It's also possible to freeze this if you make too much to make it last another week or so.

I made this right before a bunch of food was going to go bad. I also knew I'd be meeting up on a climbing trip with some friends. So, I went to their house expecting a fridge to keep it in...only to find that their house had lost power. So, we invited over a bunch of our local buddies with propane camping stoves, cooked it all up, and had a feast! Later that evening, we also made a delicious blueberry-oatmeal crisp on the camping stoves out of the limited amount of food we had. It turned out great!

Items not dumpstered or donated: olive oil, bay leaf, salt & pepper, parsnip, wine

Spicy Slow-Roasted Tomato Hummus & Pita Chips

It's been a while since I posted an actual recipe, so here goes:
Sometime in 2010, I made an incredibly delicious spicy tomato hummus that looked like vomit but tasted like heaven (coining the term heavom).  Since then, I've been on a quest to recreate the recipe since I didn't write the original down.  Finally, two years later, I think I've approximated it (more or less).  I give you: Spicy Slow-Roasted Tomato Hummus with Homemade Pita Chips!

STEP 1: SLOW-ROASTED TOMATOES

Slow-roasted tomatoes are really very easy - it's kind of the same process as making raisins out of grapes - you're just slowly drying the tomatoes out.  They range from hot and flavorful to sun-dried, depending on how long you leave them in the oven for.  Basically, you just put those suckers on a baking pan, coat them in olive oil, salt, and pepper (you can add other spices or garlic if you want to get fancy).  Then, you leave the tomatoes in the oven for a very long time (2-3 hours) at a very low temperature (around 200-250 degrees Fahrenheit).  Just check on them after the two hour mark and take them out when they're at the desired chewiness.  I'll usually use 1 package of dumpstered cherry tomatoes for this, but any type will suffice.  You can also use slow-roasted tomatoes in breakfast dishes (divine with a poached egg), bruscettas, tomato sauce, etc.  Add some garlic in the pan to roast for fun. 

STEP 2: SLOW-ROASTED TOMATO HUMMUS

 Using the slow-roasted tomatoes, the next step can either be very hard or very easy, depending on whether or not you have a food processor.  If you do, you're in luck - you get the easy road.  Otherwise, get ready - you're in for a lot of cutting, mashing, and pain.

Ingredients:
- 1 can chickpeas
- Your slow-roasted tomatoes
- Juice from 1/2 an orange (or OJ from the carton in a pinch) - this is crucial as it brightens the flavor of the hummus considerably
- Juice from 1/2 a lemon or lime
- 2 tbsp tahini (the first time I did this, I made my own tahini, which involves roasting sesame seeds and painstakingly hand-crushing them while adding olive oil.  I don't recommend making your own tahini unless you're a sadist)
- 2-5 tbsp olive oil
-1-2 cloves roasted garlic (optional)
- 1-3 cloves fresh, peeled garlic
- 1-3 tsp cayenne pepper (to taste)
- 1 tsp cumin (to taste)
- salt & pepper to taste
- If you're not using tomatoes, sometimes a tsp or two of water will be needed.

Throw it all in the food processor.  Otherwise, have fun mashing and mixing the ingredients.  If you choose this route, there's a high likelihood that you will be crying by the end of the process.

Makes roughly 6-8oz. 

STEP 3: HOMEMADE PITA CHIPS

Homemade pita chips are perfect for when your pita bread is starting to go slightly stale, or if you got way too much from the dumpster.  You can use pita chips like any regular salty snack by themselves, or you can use them for dipping in hummus, salsa, or cream cheese based dips.  It's really simple (I wonder why people buy pita chips at all): cut your pita into 8ths, then use a brush to brush olive oil on each side of each chip, laying your chips on a tin foil-covered baking sheet when you're finished.  Add salt, pepper, and whatever else (garlic powder, basil, oregano) to taste.  Next, put your pita wedges in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 10-20 minutes, depending on your oven.  Check on them every so often to make sure they aren't burning, and flip them about half way through.

Items not dumpstered or donated: Olive oil, spices, tahini

Ratatouille

One of my favorite things to do with squash and zucchini is make ratatouille with it. Ratatouille is traditionally a rustic French dish that packs a lot of flavor and is considered an art to execute perfectly. The dish has become a hallmark of lauded French chefs, and can make or break a restaurant (they even made a movie about it).

My Mom made a version of it when I was growing up that was far from haute cuisine - It normally consisted of cooked veggies with some kind of Ragu sauce thrown over it. The fact that my Mom called it "ratatouille" probably would've made Julia Child turn over in her grave, but it still got me to eat greens I otherwise would've skipped.

So, there's definitely a ratatouille spectrum out there that you can get creative with. Ratatouille can take a few minutes or a few hours, depending on how fancy you want to get with it. I'm going to give you a pretty basic (i.e. non-traditional) version of it to try. If you like that, I'd suggest googling more extreme recipes.

Now, one major difference between the ratatouille that I make and a traditional one: 99% of traditional ratatouille recipes include eggplant. Mine doesn't. Don't get me wrong, I love eggplant, I just prefer to use eggplant as the main component of a dish instead of as a supporting character. A lot of traditional ratatouilles also use alcohol and take a long time to cook down. I don't always have time for that.

And so, on to the recipes. Both are fast, but taste a bit different since one uses a home made veloute-like sauce (with stock, butter, and flour) and the other uses previously canned tomato sauce. I'll give you the option to choose your own adventure in a second...

Ingredients:
- Squash
- Zucchini
- Onion
- 2 tbsp Butter or Olive oil
- Tomato (optional)
- Eggplant (optional)
- Lemon, juiced (optional)
- Flour (optional)
- Chicken or Vegetable stock (optional)
- Tomato sauce (optional)
- Salt & pepper & parsley to taste

Throw all your favorite chopped veggies into a pan with some butter (olive oil if you're vegan) on medium heat with some salt and pepper and cook until everything's soft.

Here's where the 2 possibilities diverge...choice one is a lemon veloute sauce (one of the five French mother sauces) that requires SLIGHTLY more work, and choice two is over in another 30 seconds...

1) Add about a half cup of stock (chicken works best in my opinion, but veggie works too), turn your heat to medium-high, and let it boil down just a little. Take a tablespoon of flour (maybe a teeny bit more than that) and sprinkle slowly into your sauce, stirring the whole time to thicken it up. When everything's sticking together pretty well, add the juice from 1/2 to a full lemon. Continue stirring, taste it, add some fresh parsley, and you're finished. (This option is the one pictured above, with a tomato in there, which adds to the sauce as well).

2) Open a jar/can/whatever of tomato sauce (bonus points if it's home made and home canned), pour just enough in the pan to cover your vegetables until the sauce heats up, taste it to see if it needs anymore salt or pepper and you're finished.

This can be a side dish or put over rice or noodles for a heartier meal.

Items not dumpstered or donated: Butter/olive oil, Salt/Pepper

Vegan Tofu Sloppy Joe

I rarely dumpster tofu, so I was extra-excited when I did recently. I haven't really cooked regularly with tofu since I was in college, but this is a pretty easy tofu recipe for beginners (and super-easy if you want a vegan barbeque option). So, I re-acclimated pretty fast.

VEGAN TOFU SLOPPY JOES

Ingredients:
- 1 lb. extra-firm tofu, pressed (basically, you press all the liquid out of it. It's easier if you freeze it first then re-thaw it) (those who are new to tofu, YES the consistency matters. It will be labeled on the packaging).
- 1 tomato, diced
- 2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
- Soy sauce to taste (I used a few tablespoons)
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 1/2 onion, finely diced
- 1/4 cup ketchup (or you can use tomato paste/tomato sauce and apple cider vinegar)
- 1 tbsp brown mustard (optional)
- Cumin, sugar, cayenne, salt, & pepper to taste - be careful with the salt since the soy sauce has salt in it too...
- Some kind of bread or bun (I used a ciabbata roll sliced in half)

Press and crush up the tofu.
Put olive oil in a pan and soften your onions and garlic on medium heat.
Throw in the tofu and soy sauce on high heat for 3-5 minutes (until it's kinda golden brown).
Throw in the tomatoes, turn to medium.
Add the ketchup, mustard, and spices until it all tastes delicious and something like a Sloppy Joe should.
Simmer for at least 10 minutes so the flavors can meld and work their magic.
Donezo!

I ate this as leftovers at work, and I had all these hardcore carnivores asking me what I'd made because it smelled so good! Epic win!

Items not donated or dumpstered: Olive oil, spices, mustard

Vegan Red Pepper & Tomato Soup

It snowed. At the end of October. Unfortunately, I was out in it more than I had wanted to be all day (if you know me you know that cold weather is not my cup of tea). So, when I got home after a full day of work I needed something to warm me up - badly.

I ended up starting a cooking session that lasted a few hours (my housemates were at a Halloween party, so I had the quiet, peaceful house to myself). I ended up using almost all the food that was about to go bad in my fridge, prolonging the life of it a little longer.

To warm up, I decided to make a soup I'd never tried before from scratch, using as many ingredients as I could from my fridge. I had a lot of tomatoes, so I decided to go with tomato soup. It turned out I had a red pepper too, so I threw that in there as well.

Soup in general is an awesome dumpster chef's tool because you can freeze most soup for a few weeks up to a few months (depending on if it has dairy, what's in it, etc). This makes it pretty easy to polish off the rest of the dumpstered food in your fridge before it spoils. Plus, reheating your frozen soup in the microwave takes no time at all on days where you just want to eat without any prep work because you're freaking hungry.

RED PEPPER & TOMATO SOUP

Ingredients:

- 1 large tomato
- 3 small roma tomatoes
- 1 medium red pepper
- 2 long stalks celery
- 1/2 large red onion
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 3/4 cup chicken or vegetable stock (bouillon is also fine to use if you don't have any previously frozen or bought stock)
- A large bunch of fresh basil
- 2-3 cloves of garlic
- 1 bay leaf
- Ground cumin (2 dashes), nutmeg (2 dashes), salt (a crap-ton), pepper (a smaller crap-ton), yellow curry powder (very small pinch), cayenne pepper (2-4 dashes), & cinnamon (very small pinch) to taste.

Makes about 2 dinner-sized servings.

Put olive oil in the bottom of a pan. Heat onions, celery, red peppers (you can roast your pepper ahead of time, which can give it extra flavor), tomatoes, and garlic at medium-high heat until they all soften up (you can leave it covered to keep some of the moisture in).
Add the bay leaf and a bit of salt.
Simmer for 20 minutes.
Add basil about 5 minutes before you take the pan off the heat.
Remove bay leaf (it will suck if you don't).

Put it all in a blender. Blend until smooth.
Put the mixture back into a pot and put it on medium-low heat.
Heat up chicken or vegetable stock (if you use vegetable stock, this recipe is vegan). Add it to your pot and thoroughly stir it in.
Add your spices to flavor the soup as you like. I like mine with a BIG punch of flavor (and the spiciness gives a little heat on those cold days), so I added a bunch (quantities delineated above). Garnish your soup with a little sprig of fresh basil and you're set! I also like to eat my soup with a piece of buttered toasty bread so I can dip it in the soup and savor it even longer.

Once everything's finished, it's time to curl up with the cat and savor the soup's warmth before I'm forced back out into the cold again.

Items not dumpstered or donated: Olive oil, garlic, basil (from garden), stock, all other spices, butter (on bread)

Eggplant Parmesan

This recipe was made for me on a first date in college. We helped make it together, assembly-line style, which was a cool, interactive way to get to know each other. The guy was a vegetarian and totally won me over (with the recipe). The eggplant was perfectly cooked - not mushy or gross at all like it can be if cooked poorly. Although things didn't work out romantically between the vegetarian and I, we're still buds and I still make his Eggplant Parmesan at least once a month. I have since dated many more culinary vegetarians.

Ingredients:
- 1 large eggplant (the vegetarian told me it's better if the eggplant is uniform in shape because then the medallions cook more evenly. I've experimented with lots of different sizes and it doesn't seem to make a difference to me as long as the slices are the same height).
- 1-2 eggs (depends on size of eggplant)
- Enough flour to cover a plate (about 1 cup, maybe a little more)
- Enough Italian bread crumbs to cover a plate (about 1 cup) - bonus points for homemade dumpster bread crumbs (recipe forthcoming)
- 3/4 jar of tomato sauce (extra bonus points if it's homemade and canned from dumpstered materials)
- 2 cups of shredded skim milk mozzarella cheese
- 1.5 cups of shredded Parmesan cheese
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- Basil, oregano, salt, & pepper to taste

It's easiest to think about this recipe in terms of chunks of actions, I think...so I'll put them down as such:

CHUNK ONE: PREP

Pour flour & breadcrumbs on two separate plates so they thinly cover the surface.
Take a baking sheet and cover with aluminum foil.
Beat your egg(s) in a bowl.
Slice eggplant into about 1/4-1/2" slices.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Start heating olive oil in a large pan at medium/medium-high heat (but not so high a heat that the oil will burn).

CHUNK TWO: COVERING EGGPLANT WITH YUMMY STUFF/COOKING IN THE PAN

Press your eggplant slices in flour so there's a light dusting on each side.
Next, dip the eggplant medallions into your egg, followed by pressing them into the breadcrumbs so they're evenly covered on both sides.
Once a medallion is covered with all the ingredients, throw it in your olive oil. You want a nice golden brown crisp on each side, and ultimately want a fork to barely go through your eggplant if you stick it in near the edge. That's how you know it's ready for...

CHUNK 3: PUTTING THE EGGPLANT ON YOUR BAKING SHEET

Hopefully you'll have started this next step as your eggplant medallions are cooking in the pan or else things will be really awkward (chunks 2 and 3 overlap if you're being efficient). In the picture below, you can see the eggplants cooking in the pan on the right and a few eggplant medallions ready on the baking sheet on the left, with my tomato sauce already prepped for my medallions to be placed on top of...in the middle is the beginning of my ratatouille - recipe forthcoming).


So, you take a teaspoon of sauce and put it on the baking sheet, using the bottom of the spoon to spread it around in a circle (about as large as your medallion).
Place a medallion on top.
Put another teaspoon of sauce on top of your medallion, along with any extra spices you want to add (I use a pinch of basil, oregano, sea salt, and black pepper).
Sprinkle mozzarella and Parmesan on top.

Repeat with all your medallions.

CHUNK 4: THE OVEN AND EATING

Stick that shit in the oven for about 10 minutes (as long as it takes for the cheese to melt and brown a little on the top).
Take it out and enjoy!

The magic of this dish is that the leftovers are just as amazing days later as when you first took the pan out of the oven. You can use a medallion on a burger bun for lunch at work (highly recommended), eat them as a savory late night snack cold, or you can just reheat them normally and eat some with a salad.

Items not dumpstered or donated: Flour (from the now-defunct Beet Food Co-Op), mozzarella, Parmesan, salt, pepper, egg, basil (from garden), oregano (from garden)

Peach-Mango Salsa & Ginger Mojitos

Recently I had the pleasure to go through Hurricane Irene. It didn't hit us very hard in Maryland, but everyone was told not to go out of the house. So, while I waited for the power to go out with a friend (it never did), we made some peach-mango salsa, guacamole, and ginger mojitos, then sat down and watched Royal Tenenbaums as the wind and rain raged outside.

PEACH-MANGO SALSA


Ingredients:

- 3 small peaches, diced (from a large bushel given to us at work by a customer bought from a local farmer's market)
- 1 mango, diced
- 3-5 cups diced (fresh) tomatoes
- 2 cups diced white onion
- 1 clove garlic
- 1/2 - 1 jalapeno pepper - with seeds (depending on desired spiciness)
- 1/2 yellow bell pepper, diced
- Juice from 2 limes
- 1 bundle of fresh cilantro, chopped
- Salt (we needed quite a bit), black pepper, & cayenne to taste

Place tomatoes, onions, jalapeno, and bell peppers in a large pot over medium heat for 10 minutes, allowing the tomatoes to release their juices.
Add peaches & mango, then cook for an additional 5 minutes.
By this time, there should be a LOT of liquid accruing in your pot. Depending on how watery you like your salsa to be, drain as much off as you'd like. I ended up draining off about half the liquid (but kept enough to use as canning fluid for a few jars).
Add lime juice, cilantro, and extra spices.
Cool down the salsa before serving.
Can it if you'd like so you can bring it to a BBQ or pot-luck or give it as a gift to a friend. Plus, if you can it, you can enjoy the salsa in the winter when none of the ingredients are in season anymore! But BEWARE: There's not a whole bunch of acid in this recipe, so I wouldn't use the salsa after a few months - 6 at most (even if it's been properly sealed the whole time). If you want to keep the salsa longer, just add some apple cider vinegar to your mixture and it should make it last a little longer.

Items not dumpstered or donated: Garlic, cilantro (from garden), salt, black pepper, & cayenne

GINGER MOJITOS

This is my favorite drink in the world. I first encountered a ginger mojito when I was living in Prague going to film school (which is funny, since the drink is Cuban in origin). Plain mojitos were all the rage in Prague when I lived there, and the ginger spin on the drink was on the menu at this really awesome lounge/club named Radost FX (Rihanna notably shot one of her music videos there). If you're ever in Prague, I'd highly recommend hitting it up.

They make a way better ginger mojito than I ever could, but this is my meager attempt at trying to recreate it. You can also do a virgin version (that actually tastes almost exactly the same as the alcoholic one and is delicious) by just omitting the rum.

I feel badly that this recipe uses a lot of ingredients not dumpstered, but when you have SO many limes and ginger (which we had), it's a good way to use them when you're tired of using them in other ways. Plus, when there's a natural disaster, everyone seems to want a drink...

Ingredients:

- 2 shots white rum (optional)
- 1 cup club soda (add slightly more club soda for the virgin version)
- 1+ tsps minced ginger (I put in way more since I love ginger - think like 4 tsps for that extra bite to contrast the sweetness)
- 10+ fresh mint leaves (Again, I like way more for freshness, but most other recipes call for 10-12 leaves)
- Juice from 1 lime
- Lime slice to garnish
- 2-4 tsps sugar or simple syrup if you're more patient/making a big batch
- A bunch of ice (crushed for more of a tropical feel)

Muddle (basically mash together) ginger, mint, and halved lime (with rind) with a mortar & pestle or a muddler (if you don't have either of these, just put the ingredients in a small bowl or cup and use a spoon or similarly blunt object like the top of your rum bottle to mash them up).
Add this mixture to your ice, rum, and club soda.
Add simple syrup (or sugar).
Mix and enjoy!

Items not dumpstered or donated: Mint (from garden), rum, club soda

Pesto Grilled Cheese Flatbread

So, I know I've already given you my home made pesto recipe, but here's one more thing you can do with it - add it to sandwiches for a punch of flavor and wetness (you can also mix it with mayonnaise to make a pesto aioli for cold sandwiches like turkey or cucumber).

PESTO GRILLED CHEESE FLATBREAD



Ingredients:
- Home made or store bought pesto
- Bread (I used some old frozen naan I had dumpstered, but you can really use anything)
- Some kind of cheese (I used a mild white cheddar)
- Tomato, onion, whatever (optional)

I'm sure you all know how to make grilled cheese. If you don't, I'm sure the internet can teach you. Basically, just make a grilled or baked cheese sandwich with pesto, adding your favorite fixin's.

The pesto takes what would normally be kind of a boring lunch and adds more flavor and nutrients. Plus, you can really put anything on a grilled cheese - fresh tomatoes, prosciutto, onions, sprouts - you name it! You can get pretty creative and elevate your grilled cheese sandwiches without too much extra effort.

My pesto grilled cheese pictured here includes raw mild white cheddar, naan, red onions, and a little pepper to taste. I stuck everything in the toaster oven for about 5 minutes until the cheese was melted (not my usual m.o. for making grilled cheese, but it was faster than usual. Also, this method made the onions aromatic and a littttle soft, but they still retained their texture and crunch). I really liked the naan instead of thick bread, because it made the sandwich function like a flatbread, which is ALSO more exciting than a plain old grilled cheese lunch!

Unrelated: I just made some dank pesto cheesy sunnyside up eggs for breakfast this morning! Just one more use for pesto!

Ingredients not dumpstered or donated: pepper

Pizza

Pizza is one of the easiest dumpster food options EVER.

Why?

1. It's super-easy to dumpster or make pizza dough.
2. If I get a huge haul of tomatoes I'll make and can tomato sauce (which stays good for a long-ass time). Voila! Tomato sauce for your pizza whenever you want. (p.s. I'll put up my recipes for a few sauces I make soon). Tired of tomato sauce? Use homemade pesto instead!
3. Pizza toppings are endless. Types of cheese are endless. Therefore, whatever you get from the dumpster automatically becomes a pizza topping! One of my favorite dumpster pizza concoctions involved pork loin (still cold when we dumpstered it and used that night), 3 types of goat cheese, fresh basil, tomatoes, onions, baby portabella mushrooms, & dumpstered whole wheat dough. Not things I'd necessarily put together, but it tasted great! You can also get creative - why not have black beans, cilantro, and hot sauce on your pizza? Or Indian pizza made with dumpstered naan as the crust and curries or chutneys as the sauce? The pizza world is your oyster!
4. Pizza is really easy to make - put dough down, put olive oil/pesto/tomato sauce/whatever down on the pizza. Put toppings on the pizza. Bake at 425 in the oven until your pizza looks like pizza. Eat the pizza.

The pizza I made in the picture above was a little too packed with toppings (beware!), which made it kind of feel like a quiche, but otherwise it was yummy too. GO PIZZA!

Items not dumpstered or donated: Olive oil, oregano (from garden)

Stuffed Portabello Mushrooms

Portabello mushrooms are exciting when you dumpster them. They're usually sealed in plastic wrap with very little wrong with them (if they're baby portabellas it might be because one or two are squishy).

Stuffed portabello mushrooms are a great addition to a barbeque or pot luck, and are extremely versatile. You can use regular sized portabellos, baby ones, cremini mushrooms for a different flavor, keep the recipe vegan, vegetarian, or ULTRA MEAT styled....plus, you can add pretty much whatever you have in the fridge that you've dumpstered recently. There are a million ways to make these, but they always come out delicious regardless because portabella mushrooms are so freaking good.

I'll give my favorite combination of ingredients...my co-worker and one of my BFFs Matt has an even better rendition of this basic recipe that doesn't use tomatoes, but he told me the recipe is an ancient Chinese secret. Basically, you only get to eat his version if you are at a BBQ he's attending. So, you'll just have to settle with my version:

STUFFED PORTABELLA MUSHROOMS


Ingredients:

- 2 portabella mushroom caps, de-stemmed (unfortunately - if they aren't de-stemmed, chop up the stems and add them in with the onions)
- Handful of diced red onions
- 12 Cherry heirloom tomatoes, quartered (any tomatoes will do, though)
- Shredded mozzerella cheese (would have preferred Parmesan in there, but whatever)
- 2 slices of bacon, crumbled (optional for vegetarians)
- 1 clove garlic
- 2 tsp fresh rosemary
- 1 tsp fresh sage
- 1/2 tsp fresh thyme
- 3 tbsp olive oil
- 2 tsp soy sauce
- 1 tsp balsamic vinegar
- 2 tsp lemon juice (preferably fresh)
- Fresh ground pepper, salt, and red pepper flakes to taste
- Sprinkle of fresh parsley
- 2-3 tbsp unsalted butter or earth balance
- Italian seasoned bread crumbs (you can make them yourself from dumpstered bread if you're feeling adventurous - recipe forthcoming)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Make bacon. Set aside on paper towel to be crumbled once dry.
With bacon grease still in the pan (or butter), sautee onions and tomatoes on medium-low until soft. Throw in the garlic for the last 30 seconds so it keeps its flavor.
While that's cooking, mix the olive oil, soy sauce, vinegar, lemon juice, pepper, rosemary, sage, thyme, and red pepper flakes in a bowl thoroughly. Brush the mixture onto your portabella mushroom caps (or marinate them in it if you have time to let them sit).
Once the tomato/onion/garlic mixture is done, put it aside in a bowl.
Add butter to your pan, turning the heat to medium.
Cook your portabellas, brushing your liquid mixture onto them frequently until they are mostly cooked (you can also do this on the grill for better flavor). Once you're finished this part, put them on a baking sheet with tin foil.
Stuff the caps with your tomato/onion/garlic mixture. Add your bacon bits, then top it off with a liberal amount of shredded mozzarella cheese and bread crumbs.
Melt 1-2 tbsp of butter down in your pan, then drizzle it over the breadcrumb top of your mushrooms.
Throw in the oven for about 7-10 minutes until your cheese melts.
Turn your oven to broil (550 degrees) and keep a close eye on your mushrooms - take them out once the tops begin to brown. BEWARE - they will burn quickly!
Take them out, sprinkle with parsley, and you're done!

Items not dumpstered or donated: Bacon, garlic, rosemary (from garden), sage (from garden), thyme (from garden), parsley (from garden), mozzarella, butter, olive oil, soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, pepper & salt

Shrimp Burrito Taco Thingies & Guacamole

The meal I had the other night was perfect. PERFECT! It was filling and delicious and fresh and (other than the 2 avocados), pretty low on calories if you care about that sort of thing. It was one of those magic moments where you realize all the ingredients you have on hand are exactly what you need to make something awesome happen.


SHRIMP BURRITO TACO THINGIES

I'm just writing down what I made. If you're vegetarian or vegan, things can be substituted or removed and you'll still have a pretty hearty meal at the end of the day.

Ingredients:

- 8 raw shrimp (or protein of some other sort - black beans, black eyed peas, chicken, whatever)
- 1 clove garlic
- Guacamole (see recipe below to make at home)
- 2 tbsp red onion, diced
- 2 tsp green pepper, diced
- 2 tsp red pepper, diced
- 2 tsp mango, diced (previously frozen and thawed)
- 0.5-1 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese (optional)
- Juice of 0.5 lime
- Lime zest (CRUCIAL)
- 1 tbsp butter (or olive oil)
- 1 cup cooked wild rice (or whatever kind you have on hand - I just love the flavor and texture of wild rice)
- 2 wraps
- Salt, red pepper flakes, pepper, and cilantro to taste

Cook your rice. With about 10 minutes left to go, start cooking everything else.
Marinate raw shrimp for 5 minutes in lime juice with lime zest, salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes.
Melt butter in a pan on medium-high. Throw in your shrimp to cook. At the last moment, throw in 1 clove of minced garlic. While you're waiting for the shrimp to cook, start cutting your other ingredients and make your guacamole.
Once the shrimp is done, cut it up and put it aside.
Clean your pan or get a new one. Put one of your wraps in it on medium-low heat.
Shred as much cheddar as you want on the bottom of it and spread a liberal amount of guacamole next to it. Add your shrimp (so it stays warm). Sprinkle the other ingredients and fresh cilantro on top and cook until the cheese is melted (maybe 2 minutes or less).
Remove from the burner and make a second burrito taco thingy.
Wrap it up and enjoy!
You can now add hot sauce, sour cream, or whatever else you might want. I personally love how fresh all the ingredients were in this, so I didn't want to sully them with any extra nonsense.

After I was finished, I had extra guacamole left over. Luckily, I still had some tortilla chips from a BBQ at my house a month or two ago, so I polished off the rest of the guac in no time! Honestly, I would have eaten it straight, though...

GUACAMOLE

This is the simplest guacamole I know how to make. You can always jazz it up with cilantro, tomatoes, lime juice instead of lemon, jalapeno, and other spicy stuff. You can blend cheese into it...the options are limitless. This is my Mom's really easy recipe that always tastes awesome and takes about 1 minute total to make.

Ingredients:

- 2 ripe avocados (if you get them the day before you eat them, put them in a sealed brown paper bag overnight and they'll ripen faster).
- 2 tsp lemon juice (some acid is necessary if you plan on keeping it more than 1 day - the acid is what keeps it from going brown)
- 2 cloves of garlic, minced
- Salt to taste

Quarter the avocados and put them in a bowl. Mash up with a fork (you can also use a food processor for this part, but it takes more time during cooking and clean-up, so I forgo it).
Mix in minced garlic and lemon juice.
Mix in salt to taste. Beware - if you're using the guacamole with chips, most tortilla chips are already super salty and can ruin the guacamole experience if you've over-salted it. This needs to be synergy in your mouth.
DONE.

This makes a great snack or pot luck item OR YOU CAN SPREAD IT ON ANYTHING (sandwiches, burritos, bagels, pizza...it's pretty easy to get creative with it).

Items not dumpstered or donated: Butter, bell peppers (from my garden), cilantro (from my garden), rice, garlic, shrimp

Summer Salads - Sesame Tomato and Citrus Carrot

Now that it's summer, expect more produce in the dumpster (yay)! Also, expect more recipes using that produce (yay)!


SESAME TOMATO SALAD

So, the first time I made this, I made it as a tomato and cucumber salad paired with some similarly marinated tuna steaks, but then I ran out of cucumber and just used tomatoes for a quick snack before work. It still tasted awesome; it was crisp and cool in this suffocating summer heat. Honestly, this recipe is all about the dressing. It doesn't really matter what you put the dressing on, because it will automatically taste delicious. I just have 8 million cherry tomatoes to use right now before they go bad, and this makes me eat them faster than Justin Bieber can run away from a flashmob of tweens.

Ingredients:

These amounts are good for about 1-2 small side servings.

- Cherry tomatoes, halved (add heirlooms if you have them for color and extra flavor like I did) (you can also use regular sized tomatoes if you want)
- Cucumber/whatever (optional) - if you skin the cucumber, you can get fancy and use the shredded bits to garnish the top or do one sliver to make a bowl corral thing for your salad...
- Ginger (about the size of a garlic clove)
- Garlic (0.5-1 clove per serving of tomatoes)
- 1.5 tsp sesame oil
- 1 tbsp white vinegar or rice vinegar
- Toasted sesame seeds
- 2 tsp soy sauce

Shred your ginger onto the tomatoes.
Mince garlic, toss that in.
Pour all the other stuff on top (tweak the ratios if you want more bite).
Serve it.

BOOM. Easy.

This is very similar to the sauce I used with my Bok Choy & Green Beans - the salad dressing is a lighter, more refreshing version (due to the vinegar). However, you could totally substitute raw green beans as your salad material and go to town if you needed to use them up. If I were to use green beans, I'd probably julienne them first so they would absorb more of the juicy stuff. I made this dressing to put on a mostly dumpstered salad at my friends' house and they LOVED it, so I'm pretty sure I'm not insane that this stuff is the nomz.




CITRUS CARROT SALAD

Ingredients:
- Carrots
- Lime juice (lemon can be substituted, but it doesn't taste as good)
- Salt & Pepper to taste. Use fresh cilantro if you're feeling sassy.

Shred or julienne carrots (the thinner the better).
Thoroughly cover in lime juice.
Add salt/pepper/cilantro/whatever to taste (optional - I usually won't add anything).

DONE.

Super easy and refreshing. Plus, you needed ZERO other materials besides those you dumpstered! Amazing!

Items not dumpstered or donated: garlic, ginger, sesame oil, soy sauce, sesame seeds, white vinegar, salt & pepper

Failure & Ugliness (Gnocci)

I STILL had yukon gold potatoes left over from January (I promise it's not as gross as it sounds. Potatoes, when kept in the fridge, last super-long). However, their continued presence in my life was beginning to become a nuisance to my fridge space.

Since I'd never made it, I decided to whip up some simple gnocci (a pasta-ish dough thing made of potatoes). There's plenty of videos on the internet describing the process of making it. However, it takes a few tries to figure out the correct potato to flour to egg ratio. Gnocci is awesome because it's made of potatoes, which already last super-long, PLUS you can freeze it for up to 3 months MORE once you've made the dough nugget things.

I ended up pairing my gnocci with a home-made tomato sauce I had canned a while back, adding extra sauteed veggies (onion, tomato, whatever's in the fridge), garlic butter, Worcestershire sauce, & folded in some Parmesan cheese with salt & pepper to taste (leave the Worcestershire out if you want the meal to be vegetarian).

The good news was that the gnocci + sauce combo tasted GREAT! The bad news was that...well, it looked like someone blew chunks in a bowl, and my gnocci resembled stillborn cats more than food.
Thankfully, the gnocci made me fondly remember the first hummus I'd ever made and still the best hummus I've ever eaten. It was a spicy roasted tomato hummus that a friend dubbed heavom (tasting like heaven + looking like vomit).
One of my largest regrets in life is not writing down the exact recipe for that hummus. I can basically approximate it (and probably will for a future entry), but it's never been as good as that first batch *le sigh*

I try to make my food aesthetically pleasing (especially when serving it to others), but when you experiment with making things you've never made before, sometimes you end up with something that doesn't taste or look very good. Still, you try to fix your mistakes and avoid them in future batches of a dish. For example, I now know that hummus needs more tahini to coagulate better and gnocci needs a crapton of flour to keep from sticking to its neighbors (I will hopefully write a post soon to redeem my gross gnocci). Lessons learned.

This brings me to one of the coolest things about having groceries out of the trash: I'm more willing to take risks with the food I make. If I mess a dish up and it's inedible, it won't really matter because half the world thinks food out of dumpsters is inedible anyway and I never paid for the food, so it was just time lost. So, I primarily try to make my food into something I enjoy the taste of. If it looks like mush, so be it!

Items not dumpstered or donated: Olive oil, butter, garlic, salt, pepper, flour, egg