So last night I made bread again. I swear there is nothing like the smell of freshly baked bread wafting through the house. I had a minor disaster with one of the loaves. I had turned the oven on to preheat and apparently one of the loaves was too close to the vent that steam comes out of near the back of the stove. When I picked it up to put it in the oven I dropped that end, so of course the dough fell on that end pretty badly.

At first my thought was to just throw it out. One loaf was worth 25 cents worth of ingredients, but then I thought 25 cents is 25 cents, so instead I decided to just bake it anyway. If nothing else it could be made into croutons or breadcrumbs, and at the very worst fed to the ducks. They love it when you scatter bread on their little pond.

I'm glad I baked it though. What I ended up with was one light and fluffy, beautiful perfect loaf of bread and one denser, heavier, heartier type of bread. So the perfect loaf I cut up this morning (it's so much easier to cut thin slices with cold bread than with hot or even slightly warm bread) and we will use that one for sandwiches and toast, and the denser loaf, I cut into thicker pieces and that can be dinner bread. It's perfect for dipping in chili or putting garlic butter on or just smearing with jelly.

How often do you catch yourself thinking it's only 25 cents or it's only a dollar? When you do, what do you do about it? Do you throw the item out or do you tell yourself waste is waste and try to salvage it? I'm not talking about something moldy or icky, but just something usable if not in the way you previously intended.

I spent a lot of time trying to train myself out of the "it's only" mindset. If I had let that run rampant, I wouldn't have an emergency fund today. After all I mostly built it with ones and coins in the beginning and "only" $10 a month deposit. Now my montly deposit is $100, but at the start it wasn't. I had a lot of people who told me saving the little bits would never add up to something, but I've proven over and over again in my life that it does.

So yeah, maybe that 25 cent loaf of dough going into the garbage can instead of the oven wouldn't have been the end of the world, but I would have been wasting not only the cost of the ingredients used, but the time and effort to make the bread and also a place in the garbage can and eventually the landfill. Since I'm trying to lessen all of my household waste, not just food, that would have made me unhappy.

Speaking of lessening household waste, DH brought one of the compost bins in from the old house. We are going to try to get it reassembled today and then I can start on composting here. There are so many food scraps that the chickens won't eat and that the garbage disposal does not want to tackle, like onion skins, corn husks, cauliflower cores, cabbage cores, broccoli stems, pineapple skins, and long potato peelings. We probably throw out at least one kitchen-sized garbage sack full of that every two weeks (not that I save it, I'm estimating based on a little every day).

It'll be nice to turn those into compost. And with the straw that we clean out of the chicken coop and duck den (full of manure) each morning and the grass clippings from the untreated lawn, there will be plenty of brown and green waste to mix in with the scraps to have a healthy pile going in no time. And next spring we'll have a very big bin of compost for the garden. Now if I can just get DH to empty the other bin out at the old house and bring it in for my tomato garden, I'd be really happy.