WFMW: Bringing Cookies to the Party

It is Works for Me Wednesday, the day on which I wow the world with my acts of home-making wonder. Please don't laugh at me when you realize that all of my tips are things that you, your mama, and your cousin Thelma have been doing for years.

Disposable containers irk me. Call it just another sign of our affluent society, but I just can't see any justification for the financial and ecological cost of single-use plates, bowls, and containers.

How difficult is it really to put plates in your dishwasher after the meal?

In fact, I feel the self-righteousness rising up in my gut when we go to a party where there are stacks of styrofoam plates, bins of plastic forks, and coolers full of un-recyclable juice boxes.

This is a moral imperative, people. Disposable is wasteful!

Here's the rub: I hate chasing down my bowls and platters at the end of a party. Especially because I rarely want to stay until the end of a party. So when I am asked to bring something along, I lean toward disposable packaging. But I just can't bring myself around to purchasing Gladware for this purpose. Then I devised a simple, unwasteful (but tasetful) solution -- gift boxes. Look at those egg cookies the Agents painted this weekend:

Shirt boxes leftover from Christmas are the perfect size, quite stable, and very cute. These were a hit at Easter dinner at my sister's house. I sent a dozen cupcakes off to a PTA event* in a gift box last week, and they fit perfectly as well.

I keep a stash of used boxes** in the art room for impromptu gift-giving, marble painting and contained sensory fun, but even if you don't hoard Christmas wrappings,you may have something equally useful around the house. I know from experience that a single-layer cake fits snugly inside of a cereal box, and that shoe boxes are very versatile containers.

I can feel good (or at least better) about the container being discarded at the end of the day, since it is something that otherwise would have gone to waste.

Works for me!

*Yes, you read that right. P-T-A. And yes, I was in fact humming Harper Valley P.T.A. as I smeared homemade chocolate buttercream across the cupcakes.
**Yes, the waste of single-use wrapping bothers me as well, but that is a topic for another post.