Cream and Cereal Muffins #Muffin Monday

Got leftover cream? Got leftover cereal? This is milk and cereal with an edge. Save money and eat well by shopping your pantry first and combining your leftovers in a sweet-yet-wholesome breakfast snack.

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The idea behind these muffins is to make a warm breakfast bread out of something you've got on hand after the holidays. After countless pre-Thanksgiving trips to the grocery store [where every year without fail I overhear some confused man on the phone asking his spouse about the difference between heavy cream and whipping cream--while his harried spouse is probably thinking 'I should have just gone but these pies won't bake themselves'] the last thing I feel like doing is yet another run. One way to Reduce Food Waste (link to my recent post about reducing food waste) is to shop your fridge and pantry first. That's how these muffins were born.

Deep Dish Easter Leftovers Pizza

A deep dish pizza with ham, green beans and sweet potatoes sandwiched between a mashed potato-spread pizza crust and a layer of provolone cheese. Turn those leftovers into a Friday Night Pizza!

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You may be wondering why, the day after Thanksgiving, I'm talking about Easter. It's quite simple--last year we had multiple Thanksgiving celebrations and I ended up with leftovers of both ham and turkey. I used the turkey, cranberry, and stuffing in my Deep Dish Thanksgiving Leftovers Pizza and made a different version with ham & green beans. I'm calling it Easter Leftovers Pizza because for Easter we usually serve ham, green beans, sweet potatoes and of course no holiday is complete without MA's Make Ahead Irish Mashed Potato Casserole.

Finding ways to repurpose your leftovers into something the family will enjoy is one way to reduce food waste. For more ways, please check out my Food For Thought--Reducing Food Waste post.

I must say I preferred this pizza, with ham & Alanna's World's Best Green Bean Casserole, to the turkey, cranberry, and stuffing version. I'm not sure why, taste is subjective after all. Perhaps it's because I just really love my turkey leftovers in sandwiches spread with Cranberry Salsa.

As an aside, I had my first Thanksgiving Leftovers sandwich last night, on a Buttermilk Potato Roll--recipe from Donna Currie's Make Ahead Bread: 100 Recipes for Bake-It-When-You-Want-It Yeast Breads (Amazon affiliate link) spread with both cranberry salsa and sweet potato casserole. Yum. This book was an early birthday present to me from my daughter, and I'm really looking forward to baking more from it. Consider it as a Christmas gift for the baker--or wannabe baker--in your life!

For more pizza recipes, arranged in categories like Pizza Dough recipes, Savory Pizzas with Fruit, Pizzas with Meat and Vegetarian Pizzas, all alphabetical with thumbnail photos because that's how I roll--please check out my Visual Pizza Recipe Index. I've also got a Friday Night Pizza Night board on Pinterest, if you follow me there. I suppose I ought to include here that I'm now on Instagram. And, as ever, I'm sharing stuff that catches my eye on my FB page. Would you like to know how to Use This Blog best? 

Food for Thought: Reducing Food Waste

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George Mertz of Patchwork Gardens CSA, delivering my Thanksgiving dinner yesterday, including a turkey grown by the Filbrun family of Maker's Meadow

Today's post is a tangent from my typical 'how to make the most of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share produce' recipe posts, but it is equally important to me: reducing food waste.

Recently I attended the Montgomery County Food Summit [in Ohio. I grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland and went to school in Montgomery County, Virginia. There are lots of Montgomery Counties. Montgomery sure got around]. This was my 3rd year attending. The theme Hunger and the Local Food System didn't immediately make me say 'Wow! I don't want to miss this!' but I figured I'd learn something. It's always good to learn new things.

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I was delighted by Barb Asberry's talk on The Perspective of Value: Food Waste in the Desert. The last time I'd listened to someone talk about municipal solid waste--part of a series of composting classes--I was NOT taking notes as fast as I could. Barbara hooked me with this:

Let's feed people. Not landfills.

Boy that sounds so simple. It's too easy to forget, when you set out your cans on trash pickup day, that your trash doesn't magically disappear. It has to go somewhere, and that usually means a landfill. My county is pretty average in the U.S., and 31% of the overall food supply is wasted. That's 133 billion pounds that could have gone to feed someone or some thing.

In our county waste stream, a bit more than one third of the solid waste is made up of pure trash, a bit more than that are things that can be recycled, and a bit less are things that can be composted. Most of the compostable material is food--it makes up 15% of the overall disposed municipal solid waste. [How do they determine this? Analyzing truckloads of trash. Fun!] Other compostable items include tissues/paper napkins, yard waste, and wood. As the pounds of food waste increase so do the pounds of trash and compostable food containers.

Only one of these is really too far gone to eat--the smoothie that languished forgotten in the fridge.

In my kids' lifetime, the amount of food waste in Montgomery County has more than doubled, from 6.25% in 1996 to 15% in 2014. That's crazy! It's not like people aren't going hungry here, either. We're all paying for this waste--paying by needing to buy more food, paying more people to pick up the waste, paying companies to dispose of it using more fuel and more vehicles, paying environmentally by landfills reaching capacity at a faster rate. What can you do, in addition to the obvious (menu plan, buy what you need, compost at home)?

Start at home. Do the things in front of you.

This quote, from Mother Teresa via Ambassador Tony Hall who delivered the keynote, resonated with me. One person can make a huge difference.  While composting is a good idea--what about before you get to that point? Before the arugula has yellowed, before the cilantro becomes slimy? If you have usable food, feed a living thing with it.

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You are probably donating to food drives this time of year. Know this--for every 24 bags of food assistance handed out in food pantries, soup kitchens, churches, shelters, etc across the United States, the federal government provides 23 of those bags [Michelle Riley, The Foodbank]. Vote to keep hungry people fed. Keep donating food. Don't forget to donate in January, April, July! Hungry people need food year round, not just during the holidays. 

• Want to donate food? Click here for food safety guidelines.

• Want to know where to donate? Click here for Hungerpedia, a resource which matches agencies-in-need with food donors.

• Food banks accept fresh food, too. Click here to find a local food bank.

I'll close with the following image. These cards were handcrafted by a Susan J of Chicago, IL. She sent them on to From Our Hearts, who sent them forward to where my spouse is deployed. To all the paper crafters who donate blank handmade cards to the troops--thank you.  It means a lot and I appreciate your talents. Happy Thanksgiving!