No Food waste Saturday: AKA My Adventures With Oatmeal

So I have recently been reading posts and blogs by "the frugal girl" and have been inspired. I am determined to eliminate food waste in our home. I know you are thinking"What the heck is food waste?" and "EEEWWWW!". No, no, not THAT kind of food waste, not the crusts from 'my kid won't eat the crusts off her sandwich', kind of waste. Not the banana peel, coffee grounds, chicken bones kind of waste.
 I am referring to food that you buy with EVERY INTENTION of using to cook/bake with, to enjoy, to savor etc and it ends up sitting in the fridge or sitting on the shelf and goes bad and BAM! (to quote Emeril) it ends up in the trash as food waste.
This is food that could have been used, could have been eaten, but it fell victim to one of several common household maladies.

• One, it could have succumb to "the back of the fridge" syndrom.
•  Two, it could have been organic and already had a shelf life of roughly 1 day, j/k. (But seriously though, organic stuff does spoil faster).
• Three, it could have fell victim to the dreaded 'we've already eaten that four times in the last two days I will scream if forced to eat it again' disease.

So, in an effort to eliminate food waste I dug deep and sacrificed my taste buds in an effort to use up the last of our oats before they went bad and turned into dreaded food waste.
Yes, folks. I dug deep, I told my taste buds to 'take a hike' and I experimented with a recipe I had never tried before. Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Muffins.
I found it on allrecipes.com, and decided, what the heck!

Yes, you heard me, oatmeal in muffins! They are surprisingly good. I am sure the extra cup of chocloate chips and the melted chocolate chunks (to make them even more chocolately surely didn't hurt either). 
So far I am loving this whole no food waste thing. I wonder what you have in your cabinets that is about the go bad that you can "scarifice your taste buds" and use up?

My deepest darkest secret...dum, dum, dum!

Hey folks,
Do you wanna' know a secret? I love when people "spoil" movies for me. I know, I know, you hate that don't you. You hate when others "ruin" the ending of a movie or book, or explain a TV show to you, before you have watched it. But honestly folks, I like it. I like it ALOT. Why? Well I hate sitting on the edge of my seat (figuratively) just waiting. Suspense is really overwhelming to me, so I would just rather know up front what will happen, so I can actually enjoy myself. PLUS there's this pesky problem of my children. If I don't find out what will happen at the end, before I watch, then I most likely will never find out how it ends, or be confused as to how the plot got from point A to Z.
Let me give you an example. I put in Fringe disc in the DVD player. Season 2 disc 4. Super good episodes. I start the first episode on the disc, I watch the first few minutes, I hear child #1 whining. My attention is distracted. I step out the room to attend to her, come back 5 minutes later, darn I forgot to pause it and now I have to skip back to previous scene. I start watching the scene that I had missed.........now the plot thickens and it is really looking like they have a conundrum on their hands. Peter, Dr. Bishop, Olivia are racing to fix/cure/understand something.....ooo....ooo...ooo, goody!
It is then that Child #2 awakens from his nap and make his displeasure known, AAAAAAHHHHHH, WWWWWAAAAA!. Sigh, press pause. Go to other room, pick him up, change diaper, check on Child #1, (still playing dress up, she's doing fine), bring Child #2 with me back to the tv room. Ok, back to the show.
 "Mommy! food, food food!"- okay, press pause. I make Child #1 some lunch. I sit with her, we talk about the merits of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and how they are "so tastey".  I nurse child #2. Child #1 decides she is done with lunch, and now wants to water color paint. Ok, I drag out the supplies, set her up. All the time while holding Child #2 in one arm.
Now let me tell you, if I did NOT know how the series was going in Season 5, I would be absolutely clueless as to how this particular episode is going, because now, it is more than an hour later and I have seen 15 minutess of the episode and the last thing I now remember is the opening credits!
Yes! Wiithout spoilers I would be clueless... and frustrated and never get to find out what happens at the end of anything. Really and truly, at this point. I might as well skip to the last chapter of most books too, you know, just in case I don't get to finish those either.