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.)