Reducing food waste: bananas

Last week I wrote about a new favorite website I found called Happy Simple Living and their January Money Diet. One of the challenges was to find ways to reduce food waste so I decided to work on that this week. Honestly, it seems like we throw away a lot of food around here. I'm not sure why, but I decided it was time to do something about it. So I started with bananas:

Did you know you can freeze an overripe banana right in it's skin? Then when you are ready to make banana bread or a smoothie or anything else using the banana, you can just thaw it out, cut off the end, and squish the banana out. It's great for banana bread because you don't have to mash it up, it mashes up as you squeeze it out.

Since I don't always want to use a whole banana when I make smoothies, I lined a cookie sheet with wax paper, sliced up the bananas and froze them. After they were frozen, I put them in a plastic container in the freezer. Now I have sliced bananas ready to toss in the blender when I make a smoothie.