Ways our Family Saves: We eat up the food we buy.

The night before my grocery shopping trip. Looking pretty empty!

We eat up the Food we buy!

According to GFA's Forgotten Christmas site, "40% of all food produced in America is not eaten. That is 29 million tons of edible food wasted each year."

I think that statistic is absolutely staggering and sad, when so many people around the world are starving and so many Americans are in debt.

One way our family saves money is by eating up the food that we buy each week, trying our best to not be wasteful. I usually have a specific breakfast, lunch, and dinner planned out for the day (though our breakfast and lunches tend to be the same, so that helps keep it simple) and each item I buy has an intended purpose. By the end of the week, our fridge is looking pretty empty (perfect cleaning opportunity) and some weeks we get creative for our last few meals before my grocery shopping trip. 

This week was one of those weeks! I had to use my imagination and some help from supercook.com to come up with a dinner when what I had left was half a cucumber, a leftover pork chop, homegrown organic lettuce, and some Dijon mustard. Here's what I ended up creating:

My ingredients to make a five-star dinner. ;)

Made a tangy cucumber salad based off of this recipe.

Made a green salad with Dijon vinaigrette from this recipe.

Chopped up the pork and made a rice and pork combination with almond milk, pork/garlic broth from the bones, and spices.

Voila! Dinner is served, food is consumed, and money is saved!