Apparently the new working term is "No Waste Kitchen" and many people are jumping on the bandwagon to claim they have it.

Sadly, I do not. Of course I've tried to keep waste to a minimum. Since I've moved in the little town, recycling is nonexistent, although after seeing some stories, one has to wonder how much of the recycling stuff that is picked up at the curb or the bag bins at the grocery stores really are recycled, but I'll stop there as far as those topics.

I was raised by Depression Era parents. We didn't waste stuff because they were raised not to. Plus, we had our own money issues; we weren't dirt poor, but we didn't have a lot extra. I'm a product of this upbringing. 

A month or so ago at the senior center, there was a gal who runs an herb farm and we blended tea. It was a reasonably priced adventure costing $5 and we each took home a small bag of tea leaves we had blended so we could have a couple of cups of tea. She has a website so I checked it out and she is leading a class on the No Waste Kitchen for a fairly expensive sum.  I sat there and wondered, how hard could it be to do one's research on this?

Anyway, I won't be attending it. I have read a lot and I try to do some of it. Fortunately we live in the country so I can use a lot of my produce scraps for my compost pile. I reuse as many containers as I can. And I try to keep an eye on food so we aren't wasting it. I'm not perfect by any means, but I figure it is a work in progress.

Our cucumbers and cherry tomatoes are really producing. I've made jars of dill pickles and sweet pickles and canned them. DH loves a cucumber salad with vinegar, sugar, and onions, and I have a jar of that going all the time in the fridge. I've given away some of our cucumbers as well.

The cherry tomatoes are just starting to come on and I've juiced some and today I roasted a bunch while I was baking cookies since I had the oven on. I roasted them with onions (also grown by me) and a bell pepper and with some herbs from our herb garden. I put it all in a blender and now have a pint of tomato sauce in the freezer. I hope to make more as we continue to get more cherry tomatoes. The bigger tomatoes are just starting to come on. 

We save our coffee grounds. I put some in some of the garden areas, and most wind up in our compost pile. I'm using banana peels to make plant food to put in the water when I water them. Egg shells are saved for compost as well as grinding some up to put in the gardens. 

We bought grapes the other day and didn't eat them all. They weren't bad, but they were starting to get soft. I cooked them down and strained them and made some grape jelly this morning. I did the same with some blueberries I had to make jam, and I had some strawberries that I also made some jelly with. Lots of good eats came out of the kitchen today and it makes me feel like I've accomplished something. Granted, if I didn't have jars and rings, this would be expensive, but since I can, I do have the equipment, so that made it easier. We built wooden shelves in the basement in one of the rooms that I store a lot of my canning on. We've eaten quite a bit from it this past year, so I hope to replenish a lot of it. We aren't "preppers" by any means. I'm not planning for the apocalypse or anything. I just like having stuff on hand. 

I am going to try something new soon. I saw a recipe to make soap with cucumbers and aloe. Well, we have plenty of cucumbers and I have two large aloe plants, so I thought that might be something fun to do. Hopefully it will come out and we'll have some homemade soap. 

I've been saving tin cans from stuff we do buy, as well as coffee containers. I usually decoupage on the plastic coffee containers after we use them. I've used them to put cookies in to give away as well as use them for storage. I have one I use for my seeds and a large one I use for my cookie cutters. I save any glass jars. One of the grandsons laughed at me for saving them, but then when he saw some of the things I'm using them for, he thought it wasn't such a bad idea after all. I have been saving maple syrup bottles. We don't go through a ton of them, but I had a couple of extra ones. DH has a laser and I asked him to laser a design on the glass and he did. I made my own vanilla this last year and it was a nice gift to his daughter with the nice bottle with the laser design. I feel rich having my own vanilla bottle with our name on it! 

Speaking of seeds, we have a table on the sunporch that I'm using to dry seeds. I did this last year with some of the plants and used them to grow my own seedlings last spring. I mentioned the idea of having a seed exchange or seed library at our local library and the library director loved that idea, so I'm saving even more so I can donate a bunch. Many of the small libraries around us are doing lots of different programs so they are more community oriented and getting people to come in who might not otherwise frequent them, so that's cool. I've been saving empty presciption bottles and other small bottles to store my seeds for my personal use. 

So, that's my "low waste kitchen" in a nutshell. Not exciting. And I sort of think many others are doing the same, especially with the economy.