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.