Recipe for Waste

As some of you may know, I also write a food column and corresponding blog (cough–shameless plug). I was making a recipe for my upcoming column that called for removing juice from the rhubarb with a strainer. After that step, the recipe instructed you to “discard solids.”

Obviously, they didn’t realize who they were dealing with. I saved the boiled rhubarb in a tupperware container.

While I can understand the need for a recipe to dictate specific actions, this one seemed silly. I can think of plenty of uses for this glob of rhubarb. In fact, I just enjoyed some in my yogurt (right brain). Maybe tonight I’ll have it with vanilla ice cream (left brain!). Now that’s what we in the wasted food blogging world call “delicious thrift.”

Lessons learned:

1. Waste is ingrained.

2. Don’t blindly follow directions.