How To Stay on Budget & Reduce Food Waste: Garbage Pizza Nights!

A few years back my husband and I moved from a small Midwestern town to the booming metropolis of Denver, Colorado. We met our amazing best friends and experienced a culinary awakening. Gone were the days of casseroles and pancakes — cured meats, dinner parties, and exotic spices were our future!

While revelations of brown butter and sage sauces were blowing my mind, I always seemed to be tossing out bits and pieces of extras from recipes that I just didn’t know what to do with. I felt really guilty about this. Enter: Kristi’s magical suggestion that we have a “Garbage Pizza Night.”

Garbage pizza became a ritual in our friend circle. On Fridays we would send out a little group text noting whatever extras we had in our refrigerators—whatever needed to be used up or was about to be tossed out was fair game.

We would all meet up at Sam and Kristi’s, whip up a few batches of super simple pizza dough and lay out whatever we brought. Some nights we would make large pizzas, other nights we’d opt for lots of little pies. Eventually, this took the place of ordering delivery which kept money in our pockets and helped keep our food waste to a minimum —all while enjoying the company of our favorite folks.

So grab some pizza dough, anything that’s about to expire in your fridge, and let your imagination run wild! (Pinterest comes in handy if you end up with really strange combinations of ingredients!)