I haven’t been dumpstering since the start of covid, but my friend saved this nice lamb leg for a year in his freezer. I rubbed it with mustard and herbs and roasted it and made some peppers stuffed with cheese and rice to go with it.
This week I found a couple of unexpected items: some “chicken style” seitan chunks packaged in a tofu-style container, a bottle of cooking sake, baby broccoli, and a couple of nice bell peppers. With some other ingredients (carrots, onion, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, hoisin sauce, lime juice, a little leftover pineapple juice) I was able… Read More Seitan Stir Fry
On the way home from work Tuesday I found an enormous 15 inch cast iron skillet out on the curb. I carried it about a mile home, stripped and reseasoned it with olive oil. Today I used it to cook a pork loin (seared on the stove, then 400°F for 35 min) with little potatoes,… Read More Cast Iron Skillet & Pork Loin
Walnuts are something I find quite regularly, but rarely eat. Since my dumpstering partner is allergic and I can’t stand the thought of leaving an expensive bag of nuts in the trash, I take them and they just pile up. It recently occurred to me: why not make nut milk? After all milk is relatively… Read More Walnut Milk
I haven’t posted in a while, mostly because making the haul posts at 3 in the morning didn’t seem worth the effort. But somebody asked me about the blog when I mentioned all the butter I found this week so I’m going to talk about the scallops I just cooked. I thawed them in ice… Read More Garlic Lemon Scallops
It’s been a couple weeks and I’ve been gradually making my way through the stuff in my freezer, getting more confident that we’re pretty much always going to be able to find what we need when we need it, so I was ok with not taking everything I wanted. But I still wound up with… Read More April 29, 2019
After spending a night testing food concepts for a collaborative project a friend gave me two boxes of puff pastry, leftover from an abandoned experiment in sausage pies. There was one recipe I had in mind in particular to use the puff pastry for; Yotam Ottolenghi’s caramelized garlic tart. It’s sort of a savory cheesecake… Read More Smoked Ricotta Caramelized Garlic Tart
I used regular food coloring to dye my eggs, but there are a number of ways food scraps can be used for dye. Turmeric, beets, onion skins, and red cabbage are fairly well-known. Avocado skins and pits can also make a nice pink.
Probably months ago I found a pound of cod pieces. After making the obligatory codpiece joke I put them in my freezer until I had enough milk or cream to make chowder, something I’d do occasionally when I used to pay for the same bags of fish chunks. This is one of those things I’d… Read More Cod Chowder
After finding some good avocados this Monday as well as tortillas and salsa, I decided to make some burritos. I took a couple of cans of pinto beans down from my pantry to make refried beans. On medium low heat, I combined some vegetable oil,* a chopped strip of black forest bacon, a clove of… Read More Bean Burritos
Good Dumpster Cooking 