5 Sneaky Ways to Reduce Your Kid's Food Waste

The obvious solution is to give your child a smaller amount of each food so they can decide if they like it before wasting a whole plate. But you and I both know that "solving" the food waste problem isn't quite that simple. Sometimes my kids are great at grabbing a little and trying more later, but most of the time, their eyes are way bigger than their stomachs. So my favorite solutions revolve more around repurposing leftovers.

Repurposing can be used both for leftover foods in the fridge and pantry or even food left on your child's plate. Here are a few ideas for making this work:

Leftover fruits and vegetables that aren't getting eaten can be cooked, pureed, and added as sneaky ingredients to future meals. For example, you can puree cooked cauliflower with some water and mix it in with mashed potatoes. Your kids won't know the difference and get to enjoy some sneaky added nutrients!

You can add all sorts of purees to almost any dish, including baked goods (muffins, pancakes, banana or zucchini bread, etc.), meatloaf, chicken nuggets (purees can be mixed into the batter before baking), and more!

This is a great way to add some sneaky nutrition into your kids' diets if they struggle to eat fruits and veggies alone.

If you have a baby who is slowly transitioning to solids, you can take whatever is leftover on their plate and blend it up with some water or milk and feed it to them as a puree. This doesn't work for everyone. My first baby never would never have agreed to eat such "leftover puree." However, my second baby was a great eater, and I was able to blend up almost all his leftovers and he would enjoy it for his next meal. Of course, you'll need to be concious about what flavors you're blending together and whether or not your baby will be interested in eating them in pureed form.

As stated above, you can also puree leftovers from family meals to create baby meals. It's pretty simple: just throw the food into a blender with some water or milk, blend, and store in the fridge or freezer!

We often have cereal crumbs, tiny cracker pieces, and bread crust/ends that no one wants to eat. These leftovers sit on our shelves for weeks until I finally give up on any hope for their future and send them to the trash can.

But recently, I found a useful way to repurpose these dry crumbs. I simply blend them in my Magic Bullet, then I add them to my tub of Panko bread crumbs. I can then use the crumbs in recipes like meatballs and meatloaf where the flavors of the crumbs are disguised. No one ever complains or notices these repurposed ingredients!

We tend to collect bags and bags of unfinised trail mix in our pantry, since the kids like to pick out the "good" bits and leave all the nuts and raisins. If you have the same problem, you can toss the leftover trailmix in the blender until it forms a sort of nut flour. Use this ground nut mixture as almond flour in this flourless brownie recipe. The raisins or cranberries will add a bit of sweetness to your flour, so you can decrease the amount of sugar in the brownie recipe. I tried this with a cranberry, walnut, dark-chocolate, almond trailmix and ended up with rich, nutritious brownies with a hint of cranberry. So good!!