After my Food Network rant the other day, I must make a confession.
I use a lot of disposable plastics in the kitchen.
I do use a lot of plastic and glass re-usable containers, but I’m also guilty of using a great deal of zip-top bags and cling-film.
Not to mention all the tinfoil, now that it’s BBQ Season again.
What on earth can you do with used tinfoil?
Solutions I’ve come up with so far are to use as many re-usable containers as possible instead of baggies, and to try and get a couple uses out of baggies when I do need to use them.
But I’m at a bit of a loss for ideas when it comes to reducing my use of clingfilm (primarily for covering big casserole dishes or re-wrapping cheese, etc.) and tinfoil.
Do you have any brilliant ideas?
Re-using baggies is definitely a good choice – Mel’s been doing that for years, even though I bugged her about it at first.
For cling-wrap, I think we may own some, but I’m not entirely sure – that’s how rarely we use it. We use (and re-use!) zip-lock bags for our cheeses. You could probably invest in a large re-usable container that can handle your big casserole. When we’ve got a multi-serving dish that needs to go into the fridge, we always dole out one-or-two serving amounts into re-usable plastic containers then put those containers into the fridge. Works great for chili, stir fry, lasagna, etc.
An out-of-kitchen suggestion – you can try to choose products that minimize packaging. You don’t have to always go for the least packaged item, but when you have a choice of something you don’t have a brand-affinity for, you can let the amount of packaging sway your decision.
Hope that’s useful š
Shower caps! I use the free ones they give you in hotels, they fit my large salad bowls perfectly!
When I’m lazy I just put the lid back on the pot of leftovers and put it in the fridge. This works better if you have a lot of pots.
We do ziploc bags for cheese and find it works quite well.
As for tinfoil…well this isn’t a reduction of use but a fun use for it when you’re done… make little mini stanley cups and string them together like a hockey mobile. š
I like using wax paper and rubber bands to seal containers. It seems to work fairly well for short-term storage.
We use ziploc bags for cheese (reuse the bags until they smell worse than the cheese or are torn) but when I was growing up our mom kept a big Tupperware container at the bottom of the fridge that all our cheese and cheese bits would go into. It worked well until the lid was melted on the stove. Flat Tupperware also works well for sliced fruit. Doing the prep (chopping, pealing, …) ahead of time in batches makes it a lot easier to eat healthy snacks when you want something quick. We learned this a few years ago when we were finding that store bought, pre-packaged snack food was too convenient to eat and too available in our house so our kids (us adults too) were consuming far too much junk. To combat this we bought a whole bunch of fruit & veggies, chopped them up and loaded up several stackable Tupperware containers and stored them at kid-level so they could help themselves. It was a hit … but then we got busy, lazy, life got in the way (excuses) and we’re back to too much junk again. But it was a great idea while it lasted. š