Apple Cider Heaven

   Just Went diving and brought home way more apples than you could possible eat? Well you're in luck because I have an absolute delicious recipe for you!

   Making apple cider is so simple, but does take a lot of time so be sure you make it earlier in the day if you want to enjoy it later on! I double this recipe and tried it out in both a crock pot and on the stove. Both work great but the stove top cider was certainly done hours before the crock pot cider.

Cider Recipe:

- about 10 apples thoroughly cleaned (we want apple cider, not garbage cider!)
- 4 cups of water
- 2 teaspoons of cinnamon or pumpkin pie spice
- 1/2 cup of sugar (sugar is of course optional)

Directions

- Core your apples and roughly chop them. Don't worry about making them into small bits because they'll eventually turn into mush anyways.
-Throw everything in a pot or crock pot and turn that sucker on high!

 If you're using a crock pot, feel free to walk away from it for a couple of hours. By the time my stove top cider was done, the crock pot had just started boiling so you won't need to worry about your crock pot cider for a while. An hour or two after your cider has been boiling, mash as much of the apples as you can and boil for another 2 hours.

If you're using the stove to make your cider, keep that baby on high for just an hour with the lid on! (The recipe I followed said to keep the lid off and the water ended up evaporating!) After an hour, mash up the apples and simmer it for another 2-3 hours.

When you cider is done, get a large bowl or pot, place a strainer over it and pour away! You will need to stir the pulp around to be sure you get all the juice out but it's certainly worth the effort. If you have a cheesecloth you could also use that to strain your cider.

The best thing about this recipe is you don't have to throw any of the pulp away! Because that leftover pulp has been successfully turned into apple sauce! The skins are a little tough so you may want to throw them away (they're easy to spot) or you can easily just eat around them like I did.



Happy Diving,
Lauren

Tropical Paradise

    So George, David, Sam, and I all decided to go diving every day of the week to see which nights would yield the most food so we know when it would be best to go diving. George and I assume that Fridays and Saturdays will provide the most food since the store we go to is always busy at the end of the week. So far we've only missed Sunday (I'll publicly blame George for that!) but we can easily make up for it next Sunday.

    Before I joyfully give you the details on tonight's find I'll describe to you how our group usually dives for things just so you guys can picture what's going on easier. The guys are both really tall so they can obviously reach things easily. This means that they can get into the garbage without trouble. Sam and I on the other hand are both very petite so we wait beside the dumpsters until the guys have a full box or bag of goodies. Then they hand over the stash to Sam and I and we carry it to our car. So far this is what works best for us and is how we always do our diving runs. (To be honest I was really eager to jump into the garbage despite the smell until I realized It would be really hard to get out... now I bite my tongue at my lack of adventure and smelly-ness and just wait patiently for food to be handed to me.)

   Now, on to our delicious story!
   Because we decided to do this dive-for-a-week thing we've been losing a lot of sleep. I decided to take a nap around 10 but my alarm didn't go off! Thankfully David woke me up by scratching at my door (which also scared the crap out me) and we were off. When we got to our usual place though, there was a guy hanging out (at 1 in the morning, what the heck?) right next to the dumpster. We weren't sure if he worked for the store that the dumpster belongs to or if he was just some weirdo so we decided to wait. I kind of spaced out until half an hour later when the guy left. Then I spaced out for a while longer waiting for the guys to hand over the goods. We almost left home empty handed until David found one lonely pineapple at the bottom of the dumpster. Then they made an incredible discovery! 3 boxes full of pineapples!! It was as if the dumpster gods had answered our prayers because literally that night we were complaining how we needed more pineapple to grill when Sam's mom visits!

The next morning I got up, counted 17 pineapples, and chopped them all up. Most of them were bad but I managed to fill a whole bag to freeze and pretty big container to put in the fridge which makes me one happy girl!

Happy Diving!
Lauren

Previous finds

 Just because we like to keep a track of all the food we find, I'm going to dedicate this post to all of our finds previous to this blog. This will be a pretty big post so bear with me guys! I promise this won't happen again!

9/7/13
Our very first night diving we found 40 pears, 3 melons, and 2 containers of grape tomatoes. There was actually a giant container of these pears but since it was our first night we were pretty unprepared and only had one backpack and 2 bags with us. We grabbed as many as we could but this definitely wasn't even half! The melons and grape tomatoes were conveniently sitting on top of the massive pear container waiting for us to pick them. Surprisingly, the melons weren't even ripe!

 9/14/13
The next time we go diving we don't find as much. We brought home 2 heads of cauliflower, 3 eggplants, 1 green bell pepper, and 1 package of sweet bell peppers.

10/4/13
This was one of our best nights yet! Sam's childhood friend Shannon comes over for a couple of days and we wanted to show her how fun dumpster diving is. We like to start our dive super early in the morning (around 1) so naturally everybody knocks out on the couch. 

1:30 hits, David wakes up, and we attempt to wake everybody else but Sam, George, and Shannon are grumpy and reluctant to go. We finally head out on the prowl but I'm super worried that we won't find anything. If we come home empty handed not only will it suck for us because we're losing sleep and don't get any food, but we would be completely wasting Shannon's time and she'd probably go home thinking how lame we are for doing this. Ok, maybe she wouldn't have thought we are lame but it still would suck. 

Anyways, we go to our usual dumpster and find the treasure to beat all treasures!! We fill 3 garbage bags full of bananas and exactly 1 tomato! If anybody knows anything about me, I FREAKING love bananas! You guys wouldn't believe it either by the picture but all of the bananas weren't even ripe! they were mostly just bruised up, which is why they have all those black spots. When we got home we counted exactly 55 bunches of bananas

10/19/13
After freezing all the bananas we finally have some counter space for more food so we head back out to our local dumpster. This time we find 12 boxes of strawberries, 8 more bunches of bananas, 6 bags of grapes, 7 onions, 1 cucumber, 4 bell peppers, 1 grapefruit, 1 orange, 2 pears, and 2 organic zuchinnis!
David and I stayed up late washing all of the food but it was well worth the lack of sleep. Now I have a freezer full of bananas and strawberries for my daily smoothie! Yes!

10/20/13
82 apples, 30 green onions, 18 radishes, 6 more bags of grapes, 1 box of organic strawberries, 1 package of basil, 3 containers of mint, a bag of mini sweet peppers, 7 green peppers, 4 giant bunches of cilantro, 5 bunches of romaine lettuce, 1 head of broccoli, 1 onion, 3 limes, 22 tomatoes, and 2 bunches of celery. 

This find was really awesome because all of the greens were organic! I'm finally putting my juicer to use as well with all of the apples we scored.

10/21/13
3 ears of corn, 7 green bell peppers, 3 more tomatoes, 1 yellow pepper, 1 clementine, 1 orange, 1 red bell pepper, 16 more apples, and another box of strawberries.

We invited our landlords over for dinner and grilled up some of the corn we had found in the trash. My piece was really dry and I was desperately hoping that they got a decent piece. After they had left George tasted their left over corn (or maybe he just really wanted more corn?) and it turned out that theirs was super dry too. Hopefully we don't receive and eviction notice in the mail...

Introduction to Trash Eating!

Hello world! My name is Lauren and I'm a broke college kid who likes to eat out of the trash.
Ok, maybe this isn't the best first impression of me but give me a break! I told you I'm broke!

Anyways, after several very successful dumpster diving nights with my roommates David, Sam, and George I've decided to take it upon myself and log all the treasure we find in the trash. I'd also like to post some recipes using the food we find as I do love to cook. Oh! And of course I won't forget to post some how-to's when it comes to diving, little rules we like to follow, etc.

I think this introduction was pretty short, sweet, and to the point! If anybody has anymore questions about me or the food I find I'd be more than happy to answer them, but for now I shall get to posting about our treasures!

Happy Diving!
 Lauren