While we’ve covered food cans in general before, Danielle emailed asking tuna cans in particular:

i have so many, what can i do with them?

There’s a wide variety of uses for tuna cans:

I know some people use them to make “buddy burner” candles and you can use them as candle holders too – but make sure you put a bit of sand in the bottom first to absorb the heat from the candle rather than it heating the metal.

Some people clean them up and use them as “cookie cutters” for making large biscuits/cookies, and because everything in this house gets commandeered for the purpose sooner or later, I’ve used them as drip saucers under plant pots (pull the label off and leave them silver for an industrial look, paint them to make them look prettier – shiny white or cream gloss gives a pseudo-vintage enamel look).

Since they’re essentially just a small pot with a low centre of gravity, they’re useful for holding small quantities of paint/glue. Or as students have been known to do – use them as makeshift ashtrays.

Any other suggestions?

(Photo by TanjaS)

After writing Wednesday’s post about deli counter plastic wrapping, I got thinking about pre-packaged cooked meat packaging and what a pain they are to reuse or recycle.

The ones I’m thinking of are used in the UK for sliced meats such as ham or roast beef/chicken, “continental sausages” (ie chorizo, salami etc), or wafer thin water-injected animal shavings (mmm!). The packaging has a semi-rigid shallow plastic tray and is covered with heat sealed plastic film. According to the misc pack of salami we have the in the fridge, the packing “currently isn’t recyclable (but because we care about the environment, we’re working on it)”. (Uh huh).

There is obviously a reduce option – although depending on the alternative provision, you might end up with as much plastic anyway.

Most packs only contain a single layer or a few slices max so the plastic tray is a little too shallow to use in the usual plastic tray ways – a saucer under plant pots, a paint palette for budding Monets – so are there any other ways they could be reused instead?

In the light of the two recent meat-heavy posts, I thought it would be fitting to have a post about reducing the amount of meat we eat ;)

We’ve both actually been vegetarian for extended periods over the last decade (frustratingly not always at the same time!) so personally have an assortment of meat-free meals in our repetoire – but I thought it might be interesting to hear what other people do/have done to cut down their meat consumption.

As I’m sure everyone who is green enough to read this site knows, meat production has a huge impact on the environment before you even start to think about animal welfare. As meat has got cheaper over the years, a generation or two has forgotten that most meat used to be a luxury item, not an at-every-meal basic for everyone. At every point along the meat’s journey from field/pen to plate, it has direct and indirect environmental costs – so whatever we can do to cut down is a good thing.

Do you have meat-free days? Or the other way around, only eat meat on certain days/at certain events?

Do you avoid one particular type of meat/only eat one type of meat? Why?

On a blog recently – I can’t find the precise post, Google Reader Search is failing me – someone mentioned using meat as flavouring in a meal instead of a core ingredient: for example, a little chorizo goes a long way in an otherwise veg/bean heavy dish. I thought that was a good idea.

I remember a friend of ours who went veggie a few years ago told us one of his biggest problems was finding variety for sandwich fillings – he didn’t want to eat tuna but he felt that was his own non-cheese option. He had an “of course!” moment when we mentioned hummus and egg mayo (not together, yick!), because they both had a similar mouthfeel to tuna — but any other suggestions for sandwich fillings/packed lunch ideas?

If you have cut down/are veggie, what were the hardest challenges for you? How did you overcome them? If you haven’t overcome then yet – tell us what they are to see if we can offer any suggestions!

I randomly bought a cauliflower on Saturday – not something we eat that often because John has overboiled nightmares from childhood – and as I was stripping off the many, many leaves into the compost bin, I wondered if there were any other options for the leaves other than just letting them rot.

The first idea thing that came to mind – as happens a lot – is that when we FINALLY get chickens, they’ll like the green snack. (It’s been a year since we decided to get chickens, a year since I went on a course to learn all about keeping them but circumstances have conspired against us so far – we should have them soon though. A very frustrating wait!)

The next thing I wondered was if the leaves are edible – well, not just edible but enjoyable edible – by humans — and apparently they are. I found suggestions to use them instead of cabbage in bubble & squeak type dishes, a recipe for soup, and (my personal favourite) recipes for putting them in pakoras or bhajis. As an absolute minimum, I should be adding them to my stock box in the freezer instead of putting them in the compost. It’s brocolli stalks all over again – a versatile vegetable that we silly wasteful people throw away because we don’t know any better.

What do you do with your cauliflower leaves?

I hope everyone had a great Easter weekend – we don’t celebrate Easter but we do celebrate long weekends so had a great few days off ;)

On Sunday, we went to the Leeds Farmers Market (held on the 1st & 3rd Sundays of each month in the outside market bit) and amongst the other yummables, I got some dressed crabs one of the Whitby fish guys – mmm, meat in served its own carcass (or at least, the carcass of its prettiest unlucky fellow species-mate).

They’ve already been reused once already as a kooky serving dish but any ideas for reuses or recycling ideas now? I suspect there will be some overlap with mussel shells – and like with those, there will be different answers for people who only have them occasionally (like me) and people who have a lot to get rid of regularly (like restaurants).

So any suggestions?

(Photo by david.nikonvscanon)