Finally, a produce success!

I'd say that it's about time that I found something good in this produce dumpster. I was about to give up hope, but I decided to make the trek up there one night last week anyway. (Sidenote: When I didn't have time to dive, and I actually had to buy produce, I came here a few times. It was tough paying for things that looked hardly better than what I'd found in their trash. Tough.)


Anyway, the payoff was good this time! It doesn't look like much, but I had a hard enough time carrying back those two watermelons. There were at least 10 watermelons in the dumpster, and I thought about taking three, but that would have been miserable to carry. Along with the watermelons, I got a cantaloupe and some apples. The cantaloupe was maybe a bit overripe, but still just as good as any I've bought in a store, but the watermelons, at least the one that I've eaten so far, were amazing; they're incredibly sweet and juicy, and I can see or taste nothing wrong with them. Why they were in the dumpster, I'll never know. Unfortunately, since I went the night before the dumpster was emptied, I expect that the others all went to waste and were never eaten. Poor watermelons.

Something a little more expected

I suppose this would be a more literal action of eating off the land, as the bushes that I picked these blackberries from were actually growing in the ground. I had my eye on them for a while; the bushes were in the yard of an abandoned house right across from mine. Thankfully I picked them when I did, because a few days later, the bushes were cut down, which was sad.


I got about two cups of berries, not much, but it was enough to make muffins with and have a lot left over for eating plain. I picked up a donut pan at a thrift shop a few months ago ($2!) and haven't had a chance to use it, so I figured, why not make donut shaped muffins? Unfortunately in my excitement to use my new pan, I forgot that I wanted to make lime-blackberry muffins, and totally forgot to add the lime, which I'm pretty sure would have been awesome. Not that these weren't awesome. I'm just saying.

Oh yeah, and then I dropped two of these on the ground where they became completely covered in dog hair, and I left one in the pot of my rice cooker, only to find it a few days later when I needed to make rice. Awesome.

Two things made with one ingredient found in the trash

Multi-grain cereal with (dived) strawberries. It's funny, because I bought the cereal at the same store whose dumpster I found the strawberries.

Creamed TVP on (dived) toast. This is supposed to be like creamed tuna on toast, so I just made a cream sauce with flour, margarine and soymilk to pour over the TVP, which I added some kelp to to get a bit of a fishy flavor. I will now be putting cream sauce on everything.


I've moved in the last few months, and I haven't really gotten into the habit of dumpster diving around my new place, plus I've started working evenings, so I don't really have any energy to go out diving after work. I'm actually closer to the produce place that I used to frequent, so I'm going to try that again soon.

I have tried one dumpster that is only blocks away from my house, but the dumpsters are behind a large gate, and one time someone shut me in. There's no way to open the doors from inside, so if I had not been with someone else, that would have been pretty awful for me. Lesson: Always bring a phone or friend when diving in dumpsters behind gates.

Failure doesn't photograph well

Of course, just when I could really use the food, the dumpsters have either been empty or unusable, because of people being around it. (Did they really need to have a cop car parked near the dumpsters? Cops really have nothing better to do than that?) I'm going to go again tonight and probably every night until I get something substantial. I did find some sushi yesterday, but it was only the kind with eel in it, and that does not fly with me. The bread dumpsters never fail, though, so at least I have that. Although, some vegetables in my diet would be nice.

Sourdough bread of partial failure

Two major things went wrong with this loaf of bread:

1) I didn't knead it enough before the initial rise
2) I left it in the oven so it would be warm for the second rise. I left the house. Someone turned the oven on without realizing the bread was in the oven.

That second reason is probably the most significant in why I came out with a flat loaf that did not rise at all during baking. I also forgot to slash the top of the loaf before putting it in to bake, but it didn't really matter, as there was no expansion of the dough during baking, anyway.

Its started out well, though.

My starter seems to have recovered from its week without refrigeration without any harm.

It's not a super-dense loaf, so at least it's edible and tasty, but hopefully future attempts will prove to be more successful.

Sunday dive and more roasted vegetables

I got a fairly good haul last Sunday: corn, asparagus, squash, lots of apples, a few papayas and most excitingly, a watermelon. Watermelon! The apples aren't nearly as bruised as they look in the photo.

I still had vegetables left over from last week's dive so I decided to do some more roasted vegetables. There's asparagus, peppers, potatoes and cauliflower.

The finished product didn't turn out looking nearly as undesirable as my last roasted vegetables did.

In fact, the cauliflower ended up actually looking appetizing.

mmm...macro

Nothing too exciting

I made a stir fry, but it looked kind of blah and I never actually got around to eating it, but the broccoli tasted and looked good. boring though.

Living off the air

No, I'm not a breatharian, but that sure would be awesome, though. No, I'm talking about sourdough! (I realize that most if not all of the yeast in sourdough starters come from the flour, not from the air, but isn't it neat to think that in the air everywhere there is yeast floating around that needs only to be caught and domesticated in order to yield delicious bread and other baked goods? It may not be entirely true, but it's an entertaining thought, at least.)

Anyway, this is my sourdough starter. I cultivated it back during the first week of February, which makes it only 3 months old. I used this method for beginning the starter. This was my second attempt at a starter, with the other one resulting in a huge amount of gross flour sludge.

This starter, which I've named "Fluffy" is pretty hardy. It survived living in room temperature with not quite daily feedings for a week, although I haven't baked with it since then, so I can't say
how the flavor was effected.

Apart from the pizzas I made last week, I haven't really made anything sourdough lately. This is one of the first loaves of bread that I made with it. It's about half whole wheat, and the dough was a bit wet so the loaf didn't really hold its shape, but it had a great crumb and nice sour flavor. I've since learned how to make a more crispy crust and shapely loaf, but I've never been able to replicate the crumb of this loaf.

What's the Difference?

Which onion was from the trash and which was bought at the store?

(The one on the right is the onion that I bought at the store.)

I Still Have Four Packs of Lettuce Left

Even though I've been eating salads with almost every meal for the past week. Maybe it's time to be a little more creative (and less lazy).

Using Vegetables That Are Past Their Prime (part 2): Pizza

OK, this is kind of like roasting, but quicker, fancier and with bread. For the crust I use a mostly whole wheat sourdough, but I guess if you don't have a sourdough starter lying around you could use whatever you want. (I use this recipe for the crust)

I usually don't bother with any replacement for cheese, and I usually don't even do tomato sauce. My pizzas generally come out less pizza-like and more along the lines of vegetables-on-round-flat-bread-like. I had a lot of tomatoes, so I figured a tomato sauce was in order. I was hoping that putting some tomatoes and seasonings in a pan and simmering it for a while was how to make tomato sauce, because that's what I did. Apparently it really is that easy, because it worked out pretty well, and I had just enough sauce for the two pizzas.

The peppers, onions, tomatoes and tomatoes in the sauce on this pizza were all dived. There's also some baked seitan on there as well. I put the oven only on 450 degrees instead of my usual 500 or as hot as possible, because I didn't really feel like dealing with the smoke detector that is guaranteed to go off whenever make something awesome in the oven. But maybe it's not a smoke detector at all, but an awesome detector, and it's trying to tell me that what I have in the oven is even more awesome than normal, and I should prepare myself accordingly. It didn't go off this time, so I guess that says something. I was also impatient and left the pizza in the oven for as minimal time as possible, so nothing really got even remotely browned except for the peppers, which are lightweights, anyway.

Using Vegetables That Are Past Their Prime (part 1): Roasting

Roasting has many benefits for cooking vegetables, namely that you can put everything on a pan, put it in the oven and then do nothing, and somehow end up with tasty food. I'm pretty lazy, so I just cut everything into smallish chunks and call it good, but I guess if you wanted to be all fancy you could do smaller pieces of things that take a while to cook, or not put everything in at once so that some things don't end up over cooked and some things end up under cooked. When I'm cooking for just myself, though, I'm way too lazy to do anything like that. Those white chunks are the daikon radish that has yet to grow on me. I'm assuming everything else on there is pretty obvious.

For these I just put some foil on a cookie sheet, arranged the vegetables on top and put it in the oven at somewhere around 350 degrees. Normally I would put some oil on there, too, but that didn't happen in this case. Also, salt is good, too.

The vegetables post-roasting were not nearly as photogenic as pre-roasting. Or maybe I was so lazy that I didn't even cook them, I just ate everything raw, using the cookie sheet as a big plate. You'll never know.

Why it's generally always better to not be a loser and do everything by yourself

Diving with another person as opposed to diving alone not only has the benefit of one person being a lookout while the other grabs the goods, but also, since we go by foot or bus, going with another person means that we can carry twice as much as I could alone. This is good, because I often get excited and go a little bite overboard. (See the daikon radishes a few posts down. It's been a week and I still have two to use up.)


This time, however, I think that I went overboard with something that I'll actually eat. Bagels! We brought home 6 packs of regular sized bagels and 3 bags of mini-bagels. Some are plain, some are cinnamon raisin and there's one pack of blueberry, which are bound to be gone soon because I can't stop eating them.

Also, there are 6 packs of organic "Baby Italian-style" lettuce, 4 little bags of snap peas, 2 packs of strawberries, 2 pre-made "Caribbean chicken" salad packages, some mushrooms and some avocados. The one bag of pre-seasoned almonds went right back into the trash, as we noticed the expiration date was 06/07. As in almost a year ago! I opened them before I threw them away, and they smelled fine, but we didn't really feel like it was worth it tto take that chance.

Also had my first gross-out dumpster experience in this trip. Apparently the trash bags hadn't been tied totally shut, and I managed to get what I assumed was chicken teriyaki sauce all over one of my legs. Plus when I was moving one of the trash bags around I noticed it felt warm, and contained what I assumed to be chicken wings or something of the sort. I suppose that this wouldn't be too disgusting to most people, but it's the closest I've been to dead animal parts in a long time. I shudder to think that people actually put that stuff in their mouths. ew.

What I've done with my pepper surplus OR How to roast a pepper

Step 1: Put the pepper over the flame of your gas stove.

Step 2: When the bottom looks nice and black, turn.

Step 3: Repeat turning the pepper until all sides are sufficiently charred. The less color, the easier it will be to remove the skin.
Step 4: Some people say to let the pepper sit in a closed paper bag for 15 minutes so the skin will loosen and be easier to get off, but I'm not that patient; I usually just start rubbing off any black skin until it's almost all gone. You can run some water over the pepper if it's too hot, or just to wash away some of the charred skin that's already removed.
When it's done it 'll look soft and shouldn't have too much black on it. I love roasted pepper sandwiches, but they're also awesome for making salads a little more exciting. Or be lazy like me and eat it plain with some salt.

A Productive Night

One of my regular dumpsters is a fairly reliable spot for produce. It was the first dumpster that I ever dived at, and I've been going pretty regularly ever since. So regularly in fact, that the bus driver recognizes me and knows to expect me every week. For the last few weeks I've been getting mostly apples from this dumpster, which is great, but my vegetable intake suffers when this happens. Only one apple this week, but everything else made up for it.

First off are the less ordinary vegetables: asparagus and daikon radish. Asparagus counts as less ordinary because I would never buy it because it seems so expensive, even now when it's in season. I don't think that I've ever bought daikon radish, and I have no idea what it tastes like or what to do with it, so that should be interesting.



Peppers!! In addition to apples, bell peppers seem to be a regular find. Tonight, however, there were many more than usual. I picked up fifteen peppers, but there was plenty more left that I didn't take. I almost never buy red and yellow peppers because green are always the cheapest, and I generally choose to sacrifice aesthetic over cost. Now I just need a good recipe that uses peppers. Or more likely, I'll just be lazy and roast them and eat them plain.


Group shot for the evening. In addition to what I've already explained I also got a few tomatoes, a red and white onion, two pears, an apple, lemon and a bunch of kiwis. I'm not too fond of pears, but they'll do in lieu of apples. Not pictured is a cantaloupe that I suspect is not in the greatest of shape, but seemed worth a shot.