Brava!

I don't have any great stories like yours, but I've had to toss too much good food for being unable to do the cooking it was planned for so I often am saving things from going to the compost bin. I scrounge the fridge for odd and interesting things to bake into the bread, combine the ends of things into a sandwich, salad or extras for bowls of soups or pastas. A really great one recently, which you might have seen, was a combination of puréed cowboy beans and packaged tomato soup. Irreproducible, but really really good. I didn't get all of the puree used up before it started fermenting, but a good portion, and the puree itself was a way to save the beans which had been odd one out when I had to stuff all the contents of one freezer into the fairly full other freezer, without a plan, and it turned out a hard sell in Winter.

Sister was talking about her SO who loves to cook and hates to waste and has found use for pastrami water. That sent me to a laughing fit. I imagine it could go in cabbage soup but beyond that I question giving it freezer real estate.

Thinking the words pastrami water can make me giggle.

Ooh, shrimp bisque sounds delicious. And what a good idea -- score one for potential food waste recovery!

Saving me from guilt is one way my dog earns her keep. If I don't want to eat something I just give it to her with zero guilt about throwing out perfectly good food (or not so perfectly good food -- she's quite happy with the "misses" and mishaps, too)

"Thinking the words pastrami water can make me giggle."

I hate to waste food, too, but saving pastrami water seems does silly. (unless there's some legit culinary reason, of course, but I am curious just what that would be...)

Good save!👍🏻 Can’t think of any for me worth mentioning, at least lately. LOL, I wouldn’t save pastrami water, but using it for cabbage soup kind of makes sense. Now that I think about it, DH will mention saving the broth from corned beef and cabbage. He’ll eat it as soup with left over bits of meat/veggies still in it.

" Saving me from guilt is one way my dog earns her keep. If I don't want to eat something I just give it to her "

This isn't such a good idea. Many items in human food are dangerous for dogs to eat. One common and not trivial example is onions - dogs should never be given anything with onion in it, it's highly toxic to them.

Please keep a reference list available of food ingredients dangerous for dogs and consult it before proceeding with something you think is clever. Dogs aren't garbage disposals - if you don't want to eat something, show your dog love and throw it away the normal way.

Two spring to mind:

Years ago I was co-cook with the owner of a local restaurant. I loved that job. All the staff and the owner, and her family got on like a house on fire and it was a really happy workplace. The owner is a lovely and generous lady and as we operated Thursday to Sunday, we got to take home leftovers- my elderly cat ate fresh salmon for the last couple of years of her life thanks to my boss/friend.

Anyway, one thing that drove me a bit nuts was that the owner didn’t always label stuff that went into the freezer, much of which was homemade stock for our soup du jour, which really was du jour as we made small batches daily. We had cream of zucchini soup on the menu one day, and it was so popular we ran out at lunch time, so after the lunch rush was finished the owner asked me to make a second batch for dinner, passing me a container of chicken stock from the freezer.

I had shredded the zucchini and some onions and sweated them off and then tossed in the frozen block of stock to thaw out in the hot pot. Soon there was a strong smell of fish in the kitchen, and I was thinking ”that’s weird, I don’t recall having any orders for salmon at lunch” when it hit me. That wasn’t chicken stock, it was a seafood stock, probably made from trimmings and shrimp shells. Oops.

I called the owner over and said, ”This is why labelling is a good idea.” She looked horrified and asked, ”What do we do now?” as at that time the grocery store was closed and we didn’t really have ingredients on hand for another soup. Thinking fast I said, ”We blitz it up, add some cream, serve it with two or three whole shrimp on top and call it ”prawn bisque.” It went down a treat with the customers 😂

The next one was another soup idea, for home this time. I spotted a recipe for a vegetarian curry in the local paper and thought, ”That sounds good, let’s try it.” Well, sadly, it wasn’t good. It wasn’t awful, just boring and bland. Unfortunately it made quite a large batch and I was reluctant to just toss it out. So I amped up the spices, added a bottle or so of passata and a few more vegetables. It turned into a really delicious soup, which I will probably never recreate because I tossed the original recipe and there are so many other recipes out there to try 😁

@colleenoz...great stories! Soup sure is amazing stuff!!

I tend to wing it whenever I cook anything. I like to look at lots of ideas then ” go with my gut”.

I make a lovely French bread that Bernard Clayton originally published in his Breads of France book years and years ago.

It is called Pogne de Romans. It is a very rich brioche type dough using one white and one yellow due to egg yolks.

I decided to convert it to a Yeast Water dough using my fruit YW made with apples instead of yeast .

It went together well but didn’t rise hardly at all. I was absolutely not going to toss it. I finally shaped it waited and waited and it rose a little . I gave up and baked it. It smelled heavenly but looked weird! I sliced thin slices and buttered and broiled them. OMG they were fantastic drizzled with honey.

DH said ” oh you have to make this again !”. LOL… not likely . c

Back to the original question, I forgot to answer it.

My choice would have been #2. I would have tossed it.

The lesson learned was one I learned a long time ago. We try to limit frozen food purchases to items that are ingredients, not finished products. With just a few exceptions (like at Trader Joes). The finished products may be convenient but are rarely satisfactory.

Not too long ago my wife bought a package of frozen breaded calamari rings. A good thought, it's something we often get in restaurants. Well, it was terrible. I wouldn't say "lesson learned", but rather "prior lesson reinforced". We ate a few and tosssed the rest.

@Elmer J Fudd..I know what you mean about frozen prepared stuff. Ive met a lot of duds. I’m a sucker for a pretty picture though, worse when Im hungry!

So, the other day saw a bunch of fridge clearing. There was 1/3 package fresh spinach tortelloni and only half a serving of pepper tomato soup, so I added half a bottle of fresh fancy Bloody Maria mix (which is actually spicy tomato soup if you leave out the booze), Extra red and black pepper blends, a slice of baby Swiss for body, and a large grab of baby spinach for greenery. I'm not sure the two soups melded well, but it was good and a nice little meal. All while making Kimchi+ bread. That is, regular bread basics, some extra water, the last inch of kimchi in the old bottle, the juice from the empty jar of red cabbage ginger sauerkraut, the last 1/4" of my own pickled multi-color mustard seed (Annie's recipe), plus some citrus pepper because the dough sticking to my finger tasted bland. The last probably wasn't necessary, but it's always good in bread. The dough was very sticky, but baked well and has a nice texture, crust and crumb, both, and it's very tasty, though not particularly spicy (as expected).

WOW!! That's amazing! You are a legend in your own time! Good for you!!

Crab legs and cottage cheese are on this week's weird project. I bought daughter's boyfriend lobster tails because... he'd never had any??? What the heck? I mean, he grew up in coastal NC and not only has tried all seafood/shellfish, but knows how to cook it, a feat in and of itself. I get that good lobster is a cold water creature, not a coastal NC creature.

I didn't want to short shrift kiddo, so I bought her crab legs, knowing I'd make Singaporean chili crab legs. But she hates the knuckles. I don't know why, it's good eating. I have multiple knuckles and what comes to mind is a white sauce, maybe Cajun seasoning, and some leftover linguini. Eh, why not? I keep trying to think of a way to use both. Crab lasagna (I typically use ricotta, but it'd work)? It'd be a small one! HA!

P.S. I hated this provider's cottage cheese. I will stick with my typical next time.

@rob333 (zone 7b) . that sounds good! If you need to go to the market anyway, it might work to pick up some baby shrimp and maybe a few scallops to supplement the crab for seafood lasagna. Yum!

Favorite recipe from old Taste of Home magazine.

https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/seafood-lasagna/

ETA: Freezes well. Sometimes I split into two 8x8 pans and freeze one before cooking for later. Sometimes I make the entire lasagna pan and freeze individual servings after cooking.

ETA2: I just use black pepper.

Fra Diavolo

But people generally think that they're typical. It's natural. It's surprising how differently people experience basic taste and flavor as a whole. Much depends on the phyical expression of the tasting equipment on the tongue/in the mouth and in the nasal passages. Then there are the genetic factors which add layers of sensory value. Which genes you have determine whether you can or can't taste certain things, if you perceive a flavor as delght or poison, how intensely you experience flavor altogether, etc. Plus, experience and understanding change the way you process certain flavors and combos, and age generally increases discernment while decreasing absolute perception.

With something like spicy heat, experience and exposure change the perception. Adults who've never experienced much spicy heat, generally from cultures where it's not a thing, are often overwhelmed by it, and feel their total tasting ability to be "blown out" by the experience, making them avoid it even more. Those who have lots of exposure to spicy heat not only have a greater tolerance, they greet the flavor as normal and can separate the heat sensation from the rest of the flavors and experience both the suptlety of the seafood flavors and the flare of the heat, and enjoy them together.This is true of other strong flavors as well, like ketchup and mustard. Those who slather usually can separate the flavors of the sausage from those of the condiment, unless they're using the condiment to deliberately drown a certain unpleasantness that they perceive in a way most people don't.

I'm not sure how the chili-heat wrinkle came into my commenting about seafood and cheese but that's fine. I love spicy hot foot - Indian/Pakistani, Thai/Vietnamese, Sichuan, Mexican, just as examples. I always order the heat range to "medium", which in my area with many people of these ethnic origins, can be pretty hot.

With seafood or fish, no heat. The Italian sauce called Arrabbiata is spicy tomato sauce - I don't find that pleasant either. I like cioppino. But not with spicy sauce. I always ask.

Then there are some regions that (needlessly, in my view) put hot sauce on everything and anything. A good example of something silly of that kind is hot chicken. Scrambled eggs -"want some tabasco with that?" People what they like, that's no problem for me, but none for me thanks. I've tried these things and others and found them not to my liking. Hot Cajun/New Orleans food? No, don't care for that either.

Yes, of course, we're all different.

“With something like spicy heat, experience and exposure change the perception.”

So true, plllog, and your entire post was spot on.👍🏻