Reduce, reuse, recycle… your food

I’m dead sure the more squeamish among you just had shudders of nausea at the thought of applying any of the 3 “R”s to food, but I have discovered a way of getting healthy salty snacks cheap. There is a method to my madness.

You might notice that this jar of “Polish dill Spears” looks a little too orange for Polish dills. That’s because I reused the pickle juice to make more “pickles” by draining a can of sliced carrots and dumping the drained slices into the jar.

I have been eating these for a few days now after leaving them to marinate for a week. Now instead of having pretzels or tortilla chips when I crave a salty snack I stab a few slices of pickled carrots. Salty cravings satisfied, healthy snack eaten and money saved, all in one operation.

I used a can of carrots from the pantry that had been sitting around “for an emergency” about a year. I think they cost from $0.50 to $0.60, anyway cheap. The pickle spears had likewise been around a while before I finished them off and put the jar pack in the fridge to save the pickle juice. Mrs. the Poet and I had been discussing low calorie options for my salty snacks to alleviate leg cramps. Mrs. the Poet is a good cook but she tends to under-salt the food. I prefer this to over-salting, but it does cause me to sometimes need to eat something very salty to keep from getting cramps. The “recipe” is super simple. The lazy way is to buy a big jar of pickles and save the juice after you finish eating them, then drain and dump a small can of sliced carrots and allow to sit. The slightly more ambitious way is to buy a big jar of pickles and drain them into a separate container that contains the can of drained sliced carrots. I’m doing the lazy way first because that’s the way it worked out. I had the jar of pickles I finished and so on.

But are they any good? Well I think the quality of the pickled carrots is highly dependant on the quality of the pickle juice, and Vlasic is pretty good stuff. The texture of the carrots is basically what came out of the can, so you might want to try different brands of carrots to see which one works better. I think that all in all we can count this experiment a success that should be expanded upon.

Now if you will excuse me there is una cerveza with my name on it. Really the guy at this party knows I will probably be late so he put my name on one of the bottles so I will at least get one beer.

Opus the Unkillable

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