Making a dog's dinner of your food (Φαγητό για τον σκύλο)

We never buy mass-produced canned or dried food for Aka. She is fed on our own leftovers, as well as a weekly pot of boiled bones and scrap meat (available free from the butcher), and rice and macaroni boiled in the stock from the bones. In the summer, she needs less food than in the winter, because hot weather makes her lethargic. When there is an excess of aubergines in the garden, because they do not freeze as well as other summer vegetables (unless they are cooked in a meal, and then frozen), I chop them up into large chunks, put them in a saucepan, pour some old cooking oil over them (which I've cooked fish in twice, and now it's gone smelly and rancid - I store it in a jar under the sink) and cook this for the dog. I add macaroni and rice to the saucepan towards the end of the cooking and top it up with the required water.
When it's all cooked, I let it cool down and place it in a tupper container with a lid in the refrigerator. I scoop out just enough for each day, and never cook more than is needed for a week. When something is freshly cooked with fresh ingredients, it does not go off in the fridge. This cooking does not require a great effort and ensures that nothing is wasted or thrown out inadvertently.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

MORE WAYS TO USE LEFTOVERS:
Banana cake
Pizza carbonara
Chicken pie
Cottage pie
Chocolate balls
Kalitsounia
Papoutsakia
Tiropitakia
Taramasalata
Stir-fry noodles
Souvlaki

Meat and milk, western diets and supermarket food (Η δυτική διατροφή)

Two recent articles on food that you should definitely read if you want to change the way you think about food:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6934709.stm
Westerners (including myself) love Chinese and Thai cusine, even though they don't contain a lot of meat, and they never contain any milk, while Westerners consume huge amounts of dairy products in the form of milk, milkshakes, milk in tea and coffee, yoghurt, puddings, cheese, pizza topping, sandwiches, you name it. Thai people are never overweight in my experience, while Chinese people have only just started to look obese, mainly due to the "Little Emperor" syndrome. Instead of changing the way non-Westerners eat, maybe Westerners should try to adopt the eating habits of others, for their own health's sake.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6933744.stm It is perfectly possible to never throw food away, just by following a few guidelines:
* Don't over-buy; just because there are 15 varieties of pre-packaged cheese doesn't mean you need to buy at least three types every time you feel like something different! Supermarkets never run out of the products they stock - they just keep refilling the shelves. So buy what you need and let the supermarket store things for you.
* Don't buy pet-food; what about your own meals' leftovers? If it was good enough for you, then it's good enough for your most cherished animal.
* Create one leftovers night in the week; if you really don't want to eat the same meal twice in the same week, cook less of it, or freeze the remaining in single easy-to-thaw servings.
* Ask for doggy-bags in restaurants; it's not your fault if the serving was too big for you to eat in one go, but it is your fault if you over-ordered! Have the remaining on your leftovers night.
* "Best before/Use before" doesn't mean the same thing as "Eat before"; the food is still likely to be edible after that date. If you weren't going to eat it by the best before date, you shouldn't have bought it, but it is still usually safe to eat something within a reasonable amount of time after the expiry date.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

See also:
Taste sensationalism
Googling food
To eat or not to eat?
Eating locally
A day in the field