The Weekly Wrap: May 14, 2023

While working from home this week, I remembered that we had a lot of random leftovers in the fridge. Usually, we are pretty good about eating leftovers. After each meal, we pack things up and then eat them from oldest to newest for lunch through the week.

This time, our leftovers were individual components rather than all-in-one meals. That made things a bit harder to use. On Friday, I had the brilliant idea of making a salad with the ingredients.​

• Extra lettuce (two kinds!) - I washed, dried, and chopped them up.
• Cauliflower/chicken dino nuggets the kiddo didn't like - Baked until crispy and chopped up
• Leftover garlic bread - Cubed and baked until crispy to make croutons
• Heel of parmesan - Grated

I put everything in a bowl and tossed it with some Caesar dressing chilling in our fridge. Not your traditional Caesar salad but still very tasty.

We try to avoid food waste and I'm proud of how I thought to use up these items.

​How do you reduce your food waste?

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• What is it about momfluencers? [In Pursuit of Clean Countertops]
• I teared up reading this piece on sad choices. [homeculture]
• The rise of the cronut and food with a fandom. [The Takeout]
• We have got to stop criminalizing being unhoused. [Anti-Racism Daily]

• When you don’t own what you think you do. [Planet Money]
• Little inventions that made a big difference. [99% Invisible]
• How fish and chips became British. [Gastropod]
• How to improve your indoor air quality. [Life Kit]
• Bringing back the prairies of Iowa. [Atlas Obscura]

• For some reason, when we don't know what to watch, we always default to thriller or action movies. This week, that lead us to put on Mile 22. It's fine. Mark Wahlberg gets to play angry; in fact,  the whole cast plays angry. I'm fairly certain there was never a smile in this film; it was just a lot of angry action. Also, I'm not sure if our subtitling didn't work or if we weren't supposed to know what was being said in a foreign language parts. All those scenes were lost to us. It didn't really matter to understanding the plot - which tells you a lot about the narrative. [Netflix]
• We are still rolling through Murdoch Mysteries during the week. It may be a formulaic, cozy series, but I love it. This week we saw an episode where Murdoch gets into golf and the final scene - where he is angry at the sport - is just a delight. [Acorn]

• We tried a new recipe this week - chicken fajita lettuce wraps. The husband was hoping this would get the kid to finally eat lettuce. As she was recovering from a stomach bug, she ended up skipping this meal. The recipe is basically fajitas but you replace the tortillas with lettuce. Our store didn't have bibb lettuce so I went with the closet thing. The leaves were big enough but not as strong. The second I tried to wrap my filling, the lettuce ripped. Should have doubled up! The flavor of the filling is great, but I really missed the traditional tortilla. Recommend having napkins on hand. [Life Made Sweeter]
• For my weekly office lunch meal prep, I threw together tomato mozzarella pasta salad. It's basically a caprese salad with pasta. I most enjoy how the dressing stays thick and creamy. This one will probably be a summer staple for me. [Budget Bytes]