Hubby and I had a nice Thanksgiving. We ended up just doing one Cornish Game Hen instead of two. With the green bean casserole and the homemade rolls it was plenty for the two of us. There was enough green bean casserole left over for a second meal but that was all. We don’t typically have a lot of leftovers these days. The exception being rice since we often make a double or triple batch depending on what we’re planning for the week. If we’re doing fried rice then we always make extra earlier in the week since fried rice is best made with day-old rice. I also like to have a rice bowl for lunch some times and I don’t usually want to take the time to make the rice in the middle of the day so I’ll make a little extra the night before.

The more attention I actually pay to things the more I realize how much we used to waste. Food used to be a big one for us. We’d buy a bunch of fresh stuff and then a week or two later we ended up throwing half of it away because it had gone bad before we’d had a chance to use it all. When we did use it, we seemed to make way too much and always had a ton of leftovers. Hubby is not a fan of leftovers, so more often than not they would sit in the fridge until they too got thrown away.

Now we try to not have accidental leftovers. We do this by planning meals. When we do meal planning it isn’t this big elaborate thing. We used to sit down together and come up with a plan for the entire week, but we’ve sort of fallen out of that habit. Now it’s more than we’ll put a chicken breast out and decide we’re going to use half of it to make something like chicken and peppers or honey chicken one night and then a night or two later we’re going to use the other half to do another chicken dish. Same thing for pork. We have our favorite dishes that we do a lot but we always try to find new dishes to try on a regular basis. Sometimes that new dish is just a different variation on one we’ve already had. But we are more careful about how much we make. Like I said before, we rarely have unplanned leftovers. Which I means less food waste. It also means a lot less clutter in my fridge.

We still produce a lot more waste than I would like. These days there is hardly any food waste, which is a good thing. The other waste is harder to eliminate but we are slowing removing things from our lives. In the beginning I admit it was hard to think of a life without plastic. I mean, plastic is everywhere. But I started small and the more I eliminated the more I want to figure out ways to completely do away with the plastics. Because while I’m sure waste free or zero waste feels great, I’m not sure how realistic it is for us. Especially now. But we’re making an effort to eliminate plastics as much as possible. I don’t think it’s about being prefect or making huge changes all at once. It’s more about being aware of the impact we have on the environment and then consciously making an effort to do better.