Food Waste

For the first month or so on solid food, Luna couldn't get enough of it.  She ate the food we gave her messily but with gusto, and often bugged us for more.  The first couple of months on finger-foods was the same.  She'd eat as much of the food given as she could before it was crushed into inedible chunks by her little fist.

Now, as a two year old, I swear she eats 25% of the food I give her on any given day.  A portion of the rest will make it into the fridge, another portion will be scattered all over the house when she's bored enough to start getting creative, and, often, a portion of her rejected (and sometimes already a bit chewed on, I'm not going to lie) food will constitute my "lunch" or "dinner."
Some foods don't work well as leftovers, and/or aren't tasty enough for me to eat.  So I've started coming up with (and testing) alternate uses for baby/toddler leftovers.

1. Baby cereal makes a great face mask.  I use the remaining apple/cinnamon/oats nestle cereal as a skin-smoothing mask.  It dries quickly, washes off easily, and makes you smell a little bit like pie.  And it means you don't have to soak and wash a bunch of crusty oatmeal out of a tiny plastic bowl.  What's not to love?
2. Pureed fruit can also be a great way to get some of that lovely AHA onto your skin (though I'm suggesting you avoid too much blueberry or strawberry, who knows if this stuff stains skin?)  I've used apples, pears, and strawberry/banana as a let-dry-and-wash-off face mask.  Bonus: you end up smelling kinda like a scratch 'n sniff sticker!  (Note: Google suggests that tropical fruits and apples have the most AHA, and that adding lactic acid (yep, milk!) to the mix can be good for dry skin.)
3. Cold frenchfries dipped in ketchup make great paintbrushes, if you like the whole Arte de Cuisine thing.  If you find yourself with too many, you can also build tiny log cabins out of them, that you can then paint with the ketchup.  Or drown it in a gravy-based landslide.  Whatever..
4. Broken arrowroot cookies + milk = tasty baby mash.  Broken arrowroot cookies crumbled into icecream, which is then drizzled with Bailey's, can make a tasty mommy mash.
5. Crushed up goldfish crackers can find new purpose as hidden crunchy bits in a toddler omelette, or as a thickener for soup, or (let's face it) just as powdered dayglo orange decoration for any and all surfaces.  My apartment is like a cheesy snowglobe. 

That's all I've got for now, but this adventure in learning will continue.