Zero Waste Week - 2018 - Day Five

So on to the final day of Zero Waste Week 2018.

I always enjoy taking part, and I always learn something.

Today's challenge is to have a completely "Plastic Fee Day".  Well, I would love to say I managed it, but I won't.  Here's why:

• This morning I used up one of those mini shampoo bottles I'd brought home from a hotel. I'll recycle the bottle - and it is easily recycled in the kerbside collection.
• This afternoon I am going shopping for tomorrow's cricket tea and for a cricket fundraising event, where we will be cooking up around 100 burgers and 100 hotdogs.  This morning I thought about buying rolls for the cricket tea in my reusable veg bags, but I have a feeling they might be significantly more expensive than the packs of 6 or 8 rolls, but I don't have any way of bringing home 200 rolls for the event without them being in plastic.  However, I'm going to do my best to find big bags of rolls, so that at least the bag might be reusable in some way and the rolls will probably be cheaper.

If you've taken part yourself and had an email about a survey, please do fill it in as will be really helpful for future Zero Waste Weeks (hoping that they will long continue, of course).

What I've learnt:
My attitude to plastic is actually the same as all packaging. I don't want unnecessary packaging so where I can refuse and reuse then I do, mostly, though I've identified some improvements ... those mini toiletries. I am going to take my own.

I have found a few products that I have been looking for, such as bamboo toilet brushes.

I have learnt that I am not the only one who has had trouble with my washing machine growing mould so I feel better now that it is not just me. I shared my solution (see yesterday's post) and again feel better that other people found that too.

I learnt about some great companies who are helping make life a bit easier for people like me who want to minimise package and use sustainable products that last.

It has been a great Zero Waste Week (again).

Zero Waste Week- 2018 - Day Four

Day four of Zero Waste Week  is all about cleaning materials.

This was a topic that came up at Future Planet's Sustainable Living 'Adventures in Zero Waste' event yesterday evening.

It was interesting to hear Kate Arnell, Presenter and Founder of ecoboost, talking about her experience of Zero Waste living. I know that some people think my obsession with minimal waste is extreme so it was nice to hear someone talking about all those things you do, all those decisions you've taken, no matter how big or how small.
One question that arose, was that personal thing about whether she had children. I am just guessing that the person asking, did have children, and felt it was a whole lot harder. I think it probably is but in small steps it is doable. Ours was a gradual process of slimming our bins and changing our habits and probably only really started to get extreme by any sense when my children were in Primary School. But there is no point in worrying about the things we didn't do. It is all about  what we feel we can achieve. I was really pleased all those years ago when my younger daughter came home from school so proud that she was the only person in the school that had a completely zero waste packed lunch. Today I like seeing that my (adult) children have cut open their moisturiser and toothpaste tubes to get every last bit out. I don't mind the collection of toiletries dregs they bring home when they vacate their various student residences.
I like the phone calls about how to rescue food, like the fish and chips about to be binned at an event (the resulting fish cakes were great - and free!).

I feel that there is a theme building with this year's Zero Waste Week. Aspiring Zero Waste or Zero-ish Waste all helps. No need to carry your trash around in a mason jar... just do what you realistically can do.

Will I stop using the miniature shampoos in hotels?


I  think I will mostly start taking my own. If I can carry them home I can carry them there.

I mean, just look at what I am prepared to bring home!

Will I write to the hotels I stay in asking them to consider refills, probably not. Fortunately, when I go to events like Future Planet's inspiring event last night, I feel reassured that some people actually will.
Which brings me onto the subject of consumer power. Businesses will give us what they think we want. How do they decide what they think we want? Through their sales figures of course. If we keep buying cheap rubbish, they will keep producing it. I am a firm advocate of voting with your pound in your pocket. So I was delighted to hear about Buy Me Once, the innovation by Tara Button who is aiming to show case and promote products that last. That's just the kind of thing I want so that I don't have to spend the hours researching products that are made the old fashioned way, i.e. built to last not built in obsolescence. I want to see 'built in obsolescence' become obsolete, don't you? I think Tara Button does too. Although I am mostly a charity shop chick, next time I need to buy something I can't get second hand I will be checking out that Buy Me Once website.

Onto the topic of day four of Zero Waste Week, cleaning.  The question was raised last night about eco cleaning products. Do they work? Someone mentioned the smell and mould problems if using eco friendly laundry products. Kate Arnell said her solution was to wash at higher temperature which, as she said, tends to fill green living lovers with horror. So I shared the advice I was given by the person who repaired my ailing washing machine. He said you need a really hot wash once in a while to kill the bacteria that will otherwise build up. He meant really hot. So every now and then when the sun is out I will wash some sheets at 90 degrees, feeling glad that I am getting most of that energy needed from my solar panels.  Thank you sun! It is definitely less carbon intensive than washing things multiple times and buying a new washing machine every couple of years. The other thing that helps is essential oil. I use a few drops of lavender.

Zero Waste Week - 2018 - Day Two

Today's #ZeroWasteWeek challenge is all about the bathroom.

The recycling team that I do events for from time to time, tell me they think many people overlook plastic in the bathroom as an important thing to recycle. Years ago I used to find it an annoying task going through the bin in the bathroom to pick out what's recyclable.  So I added a recycling bin and my problem was largely solved.

Image: 101 Ways to Live Cleaner and Greener for Free

Largely? Well Yes. You have to accept there are some people who are never going to get it! They see a bin and it is just a bin - I hear Junior Daughter's voice echoing: "Why would you put a beer can in the bin that says Food Waste on it?" Sometimes I join in with that despair.  I walk past a bin with a clear plastic bag at the station that says "recyclables" and there's an apple core in it. Yet right next to it is a clear plastic bag for food waste. Is there no hope?

Well I say there is. To me, #ZeroWasteWeek is a great time for raising awareness and being hopeful that just one more person (or more likely several thousand more people, given the huge impact #ZeroWasteWeek now has around the world) is going to think about one more thing that they hadn't thought about before.  And it all helps.

Although my family are now really good at recycling all those plastic items from our bathroom, what we are really not good at is limiting the amount of them that we buy or accumulate in other ways.

It was many years ago now that I had the conversation with Mr Pitt (who travels a lot for his work) about what we think happens to all those miniature plastic bottles from hotel rooms that you've used it bit of and left the rest. Same for those brand new bars of soap.
Well they are clearly going to be thrown away. What a waste!

So we decided to bring them home with us. But then added to all those bottles and boxes of medicinal potions and lotions and things you need just occasionally or keep 'just in case' you need them, it amounts to something like this!

I can definitely see a few duplicates and "nearly finished but not quite" bottles 

The drawer beneath the basin

The box of stuff under my bed from probably before our
 "single-use plastic free year"
that I didn't manage to use up before switching to plastic-free alternatives.
Surely that means I was never going to use them anyway.

So much plastic. Aaahhh!! And this is despite having made the decision in 2015 to switch to unpackaged e.g. solid bar soap and shampoos or refills.  What I didn't do was stop using hotel products at all and I clearly didn't use up everything I already had! Many other things have been either left behind or gifted to us, but ... wow! what a lot of plastic!

What to do? Well I'm open to suggestions but here's my plan:

This evening I'm starting a "Make-up Exchange" and here's how:

1. Separate everything into four boxes:

• unopened
• barely used
• almost empty
• too old to use

2. Find a home for each box

• the unopened and barely used will become my "Make-up Exchange" box. I'll clean any eyeshadows that I still have lurking around but won't ever use. I will invite friends and family to take anything they want and anything left will go to a Women's Refuge that has been set up locally. 
• the almost empty will be the only things available in the bathroom so they get used up.
• the too old to use will be emptied and and recycled though kerbside collection where possible or else through the Terracycle recycling program which I'm setting up for my local community

3. Use up the stuff to use up and find suitable refillable miniature bottles to take with me when I travel.

4. Return to my solid / refill system at a later date and only buy make-up from brands with a recycling programme such as Lush. 

Here's a bit more about make-up exchanges on another blog post that I wrote and it gives you how to clean makeup too.  

This is another blog post with information about cleaning and extending the use of make-up.

I hope that by this time next year (or even sooner) I will have seriously cleaned up my personal hygiene act. My bathroom will be a properly plastic free zone of peace and tranquility and much quicker to clean - I think that's probably the best bit!

Zero Waste Week - 2018 - Day One

This year's Zero Waste Week is, of course:

 all about plastic!

I wrote earlier in the year about the Blue Planet effect and what a hot topic it has become. Thank you to the BBC and to the wonderful Sir David Attenborough for making plastic pollution such a hot topic.

Campaigns such as The Last Straw and Recycle Now's Plastic Planet fill me with hope that soon the life choices I make won't seem weird, but will just become normal life, for most people. Back in July 2014 I first went to my local butchers with my reusable plastic tubs and talked to them about Plastic Free July and said that I was planning to try to cut out single use plastic for a whole year.  They were very supportive and I've been taking my reusable tubs there ever since. Just from that small decision, I've started a trend.  A few months ago, I they told me I was one of four families now doing the same thing. Then a few weeks ago, I found out that the four has grown to five.  Who will be number six, I wonder?

But why do this?  What's the point of it all and does it help?  When I wrote my first book, 101 Ways to  Live Cleaner and Greener for Free, it was partly a reaction to feeling that every time I looked for a sustainable alternative to what I was doing or buying, it seemed to cost me more.  Take cotton buds, for example, it is not something I use very often, but I was really annoyed to find that a compostable cotton bud was more than twice the price of a plastic version. Composting toilet compared to water based system - beyond expensive..beyond my reach at the time. A growing sense of despair at finding that our growing convenience consumer lifestyles were 'costing the earth', yet the green alternative was 'costing the earth' in a different way, led me to take a look at what I could do for free in order to reduce the impact my family has on this planet. And the big thing was, I wanted to know if it made a difference. And so, I started to take a look at the maths and science behind various ways of saving resources and that became the focus of my book.

Today, we've become quite adept at taking our own bags to the supermarket. When I wrote my book, back in 2012, Wales had already introduced a 5p tax on single use carrier bags, but England was yet to follow suit. However, some shops had already introduced a 5p charge on plastic bags. This enabled them to monitor the number of bags given out and compare that to the number of bags given out before the charge. Looking back at my book today, I see that Marks and Spencer and Sainsbury's were among the supermarkets to be monitoring the reduction in plastic bags and willing to share their figures. I found evidence that the combined carbon footprint saving was 9356 tonnes - the equivalent to taking 1835 cars off the road.

A recent DEFRA report tells us that over 6 billion fewer bags were given out in the year from April 2016 to April 2017, i.e. since the introduction of the tax. According to the research I did in my book, each bag has a saving of 10g of carbon dioxide equivalence (the measurement for carbon footprint) so that would mean an equivalent saving of 60 million tonnes of CO2. I make that the equivalent of over 11 million cars being taken off the road.

Small change, enormous difference. 

The Blue Planet programme was very good at highlighting the other perspective ... the 'what if we don't do the right thing?'

I want to reduce my use of resources all round, but I find I particularly want to reduce single-use plastic, because this is the resource I find is often used unnecessarily, and it forms the rubbish I see mostly littering the countryside I live in. Further, it is the rubbish that when discarded in the wrong way, travels most easily and causes the most damage, it seems.

I think this is now the fifth year that I've joined in with Zero Waste Week, and blogged about what I've learnt and the changes I've managed to make. I know there are some interesting things that are in store for us, and although I'm already well on my way with the Zero Waste Path, there's still a good way to travel and it is easier to journey with like minded people travelling in the same direction.

I want to find at least one more things that I can do to reduce my consumption of single-use plastic.  I've got my non-recyclable waste down to less than a bin full per year, I've reduced my recycling enormously through small lifestyle changes and reuse, yet I still see plastic all over my house. So I know there's still something out there for me. What will it be?

Zero Waste Week - The make-up exchange

Even though I am an aspiring ZeroWaster, I took a look in my bathroom cabinets and they are absolutely brimming full of products, mostly plastic packaged in some way, many of which I am unlikely to use ever!

I find it hard to believe I have so much accumulated stuff.  I've been using the same few fairly solid plastic or glass bottles for several years now and refilling them with shampoo and conditioner that I buy in a big 5 litre container from a local buyers group with SUMA.  I also have about half a dozen hand soap containers that I refill with lovely fig had soap from another local company called SESI.

Yet, still I have hundreds of bottles and packets of stuff in my bathroom cabinet.  That inspired me to think about a make-up exchange.

I will be running the make-up exchange on Tuesday 4th September during Zero Waste Week. I thought it would be a good idea to encourage businesses to think about running a make-up exchange too.

All you'd need is a box in reception or in the kitchen or even just by your desk.  Tell all your colleagues about what you are doing and why and persuade them to give their cupboards a clear out.


With this thought came the worry that "What would you do if you have loads of products left over?"

I have just the thing for that.

There are several organisations that accept make-up and donate to women's refuges or to refugees.

Firstly, I came across this article by Sally Hughes and Jo Jones, describing how they set up their Beauty Banks.  Have a read and it will make you want to help.   Or you can just cut to the chase and send stuff to them at: BEAUTY BANKS, c/o JO JONES, THE COMMUNICATIONS STORE, 2 KENSINGTON SQUARE, LONDON W8 5EP.
The downside is they only accept unopened items.

But what about those items that you may have used once or twice but then abandoned? That's what I really want to deal with.

Caroline Huron's Give and Makeup Charity accepts good quality part used items. The rule is..be respectful...if you would be embarrassed to give it to your best friend, then please don't send it to them. For hygiene reasons, they can't accept mascara and they can't accept lipgloss. Other make-up can be cleaned. There's a full list of what they accept on the link.

The address for Give and Makeup is either London: GIVE AND MAKEUP, PO BOX 855, LONDON, W4 4AW or Cardiff: Give and MakeUp c/o Escentual.com, 63-67 Wellfield Road, Cardiff, CF24 3PA

So onto that issue of cleaning. It seemed to me that it must be possible to clean makeup. I asked a make-up artist how she keeps her make-up clean.

• Use a small piece of tissue to wipe off the top layer 
• Now apply a drop of rubbing alcohol (or vodka) to another piece of clean tissue and wipe over. to kill germs

This works for eyeshadows and lipsticks, though lipstick is generally very fragile so you need to be gentle.

I'm off to clear out my cupboards to donate the spares. I'm going to be ruthless, I hope!

ZWW 2017 Day 5 - It's #FoodWasteFriday

It's #FoodWasteFriday and what better day to publish my book, Leftover Pie: 101 ways to reduce your food waste, hey? This was the challenge that Rachelle Strauss, founder of Zero Waste Week set me a little over a year ago.  Although I thought I'd finished writing the book a while back, there was still a lot of work to pull it together.  Chatting with Rachelle, I was sharing my concerns about the whole food waste issue.

Last summer we decided to rent out my daughter's house, in the lovely city of Bath, while she was 'back home' with us for the summer.  It was a great experience but it really made us realise that other people don't deal with waste in the same way we do. After one young couple had stayed for three nights, I was sorting out the rubbish they had left behind - wondering how the bin was full to bursting! But it wasn't just recycling that I had to pull out from the rubbish.  I was stunned.  In that bin there was more food wasted, then I would have bought for my family of four for a whole week.

That's how I came to be having the conversation with Rachelle:

"I've got to finish Leftover Pie."

"You have!" she replied. 

I was shocked into action you could say.

A few months later Rachelle decided that the 10th annual Zero Waste Week would cover a different topic each day and that Friday would be dedicated to Food Waste.

"Why not publish your book then?" she suggested.

So there you have it.  Leftover Pie is out in paperback today.

We're renting the house out again this year, but we've made a few changes.  The food waste caddy used to live on the kitchen windowsill. Now it lives right next to the general waste bin.  There's a sticker on the general waste bin, that says, "No Food Waste".  Maybe that sticker needs to be bigger!  We still have to pull out food waste on occasions.

We had a recycling bin in the garage, but we decided to put a recycling container right next to the bin too.  This has helped considerably.  I guess it is that problem of "out of sight, out of mind".

So why is food waste such an important issue?

Here's what I think...

It's not just about saving money, it's not just about respecting our food producers, or our friends and family who are preparing and cooking food for us, it is not even just about people elsewhere going hungry, while we let food go to waste.  It is those things, yes.  Of course it is. But it is bigger than than.  It is about climate change.

As Marcus Gover, CEO of WRAP, said at the All Party Parliamentary Group on Food Waste:

"If we can't fix food waste we can't fix climate change." 

So, as you see, it is important and we all have the power to do our bit and put that right.

ZWW 2017 Day 4 - Time Saving Tips for Thursday

Day four of Zero Waste Week was all about Time Saving Tips

I arranged to visit a wonderful "SuperHome" local to me prior to their open day. They have a display board featuring my book, so I nipped over with some signed copies for them to sell on the day and I was guinea pig for their guided tour around the house. Plenty of top tips there, particularly around energy saving.

SuperHomes Open Day

Sat 9th Sept, 11am-2pm
4 St Denys Close, Stanford, SN7 8NJ

"If you're interested in making your home more efficient and environmentally friendly, you might like to visit a SuperHome. Open days let you quiz the owners, so you can discover what worked and get frank feedback on what didn’t. There are open days across the country in September, including one in Stanford in the Vale. The Williams family’s 1950s bungalow is heated using wood pellets, and is free from fossil fuels from heating to transport. When it’s sunny they can cook with a sun oven, concentrating heat using reflection."

Some of the things I learnt:

• I had a vague idea that chest freezers were more energy efficient than upright freezers, but I didn't realise it was by as much as 50%. 
• I had never thought of the idea of a chest fridge - also 50% more efficient.  
• I loved their guilt-free fairy lights, using solar energy from a battery system. 
• I was interested to hear they had set up a local Facebook group for sharing stuff.  I think one of those would be great in my village so I'll be onto that later this month.
• I was so delighted to hear that their local "Sustainable Wantage" group was collecting crisp packets for a craft workshop - my last fail of Zero Waste Living.  I was brimming with enthusiasm when I said to Mr Pitt, that we needed to save up his crisp packets for them. "I already am," he said.

As for my own top tips, for making Zero Waste easy here are a few ideas.

My recycling centre

I love my little recycling centre for the few things that don't go into the kerbside collection. The biscuit wrappers I save for a friend who has a Teracycle collection point at work.  I'll need to add in crisp packets to my collection now.

I have a reuse centre with these lovely pull out boxes on a shelving unit, for things like envelopes, notebooks, and sewing accessories for mending.

One thing that is wasting time at the moment is my collection of tubs - none of which seem to have the right lids attached, so a sort out of these is needed to get back to an easy life.  I use these all the time for buying meat and cheese from my local butcher, buying dry goods in bulk, freezing extra portions of things like casseroles and curries so I have home-made ready meals in the freezer for days when I have to visit clients or schools. Just a quick sort out and I will no longer be wasting so much time finding a box and lid that go together.  If I end up with lid-less containers I'll relegate them to the tool shed.

That's my top tips for tidy zero waste life.  Onto #FoodWasteFriday.

ZWW 2017 Day -2 #TrashlessTuesday

For #TrashlessTuesday, I'm continuing my theme of using the boxes from my signed book copies to clear out some space in my understairs cupboard (obviously known as Harry Potter's Bedroom).

I'm a bit concerned that by venturing anywhere near my cupboard I'll be finding waste that could otherwise stay hidden - out of sight out of mind, and all that.  But I have the advantage of living in an area of the UK that really cares about maximising use of resources and minimising waste. I live in Oxfordshire and here we have brilliant kerbside collection services and a very extensive offer at our Recycling centres across the county, which were recently given a reprieve to stay open, in the face of continuing budget cuts.

From delving into my cupboard each time I empty a box of books, I'm realising that there's a lot of packaging materials in there.  Does that happen in all households?  I keep things for reuse and I do go to my cupboard rather than go to the shops any time I send anything anywhere or gift anything.

I really don't need all this packaging.  It would take me years to reuse it and anyway, my stock of gift bags and packaging tends to grow every Christmas because we are usually hosts for the family gatherings and for some reason, no-one seems to want to reclaim their gift bags.  So these are going into a box to be taken to the charity shop on Friday morning.

Box 1 ready for the charity shop

Added to the gift bags, I've found bubble wrap which I know my charity shop can use as they sell quite a bit of crockery and other breakables. In goes the brown paper that I'm finding in my boxes of books too.

As for my plastic bag of trash to be carried round all day, I am following with interest the posts on the Zero Waste Heroes Facebook group and realising that my own zero (well nearly zero) waste is clearly made a lot easier because of where I live. I've seen people add yoghurt pots and flyaway plastic to their #TrashlessTuesday list.  I had both of these today and both go into my kerbside recycling box.

The one thing I ended up with that can't be recycled or reused was this packing tape on the bubble wrap. I pulled off the packing tape carefully to save as much of the bubble wrap for reuse by my local charity shop.  The tape itself will end up in the general waste bin - that always pains me, but the bubble wrap isn't useable in the mess it was in, so this is the sacrifice.

A mess of bubble wrap

Tape (on the left)  removed - that will go in the bin and the untidy edges of the bubble wrap (on the right) will recycle.

It made me think about how I was packing up my books for postage as I was using a lot of sellotape.  The #TrashlessTuesday bag challenge really works does't it?  By making me focus on waste, I realised by folding the very old envelopes (40 years plus, I reckon) a different way, I use less tape and that will maybe make the envelope more likely to be reused by the recipient.  Open your books carefully please, lovely people, and apologies for the excess tape of the books I've already posted.

One of the ways that I have managed to cut down on both my trash and my recycling over the last few years is to take my own containers to the butcher's, my own reusable vegetable bags to the greengrocer's or supermarket and to buy dry goods in bulk, again in my own containers.  Our two daughters will shortly be returning to university, so we had a family outing to the nearest dry goods store with almost every plastic and glass container that we had in the house and we have stocked up on all things like oats, dried fruit, nuts, rice,  and I can't think what else, but lots more.  The only packaging from that entire enormous shop was a large tub that contained peanut butter.  Senior daughter is running a marathon in a couple of weeks and she's getting through a lot of peanut butter.  We decided the tub looked like a useful container and it was probably equivalent to three of the glass jars we've been buying.  So it seemed like a reasonable packaging option.

Once you get into the Zero Waste idea, I think you shop differently. If we can shop packaging free, we do.  Otherwise, I think we always ask ourselves the question: what will happen to the packaging post use? If it can be reused (then recycled) then we'll buy it.

The one exception seems to be shop bought crisps.  My solution is to retrain my brain to not eat them. But that's not something I'm going to ask the rest of the family to do.  However, quite by coincidence no crisp packet was finished on #TrashlessTuesday so it is just the tape in the bin.

Zero Waste Week 2017 has started

It is here again.  It must be September already! This year sees the 10th annual Zero Waste Week and each day will tackle a different theme.

The theme for today was #MakeItMendItMonday.  Jen Gale, one of the 40 contributors in Leftover Pie is the queen of "Make do and mend".  I followed her progress and stories during her year of  buying nothing new and she was the inspiration behind my pledge a few years ago for Zero Waste Week to get mending.

I had quite a bit of success back then with my mending pledge, but things have lapsed a bit recently, and I know I have a whole lot of aspirational mending in a pile, ready and waiting for some ZWW inspiration and support. Trouble is, I can't get to it as we are having some building work done.  So while I can't get at the pile of stuff that I know needs mending, I thought I would tackle the dreaded cupboard under the stairs.

It started off as a fairly organised storage area, but over the years it has become a general dumping ground for mainly my own things that I can't decide where to put, haven't got room for in the place they belong or didn't make the time to put away properly prior to having visitors!

Oh what a mess.

I put in an order for 250 copies of my new book, Leftover Pie, and some of these are for the events I have coming up over the next six weeks. So that they don't spend up to six weeks in the middle of the floor in my lounge, I thought I ought to clear some space in the cupboard.  My plan is that each time I empty a box of books, I will sort out part of the cupboard and fill the box with things to go to the charity shop.Taking part in the Zero Waste Week Twitter chat today, I shared my desire to declutter and found lots of support and ideas. So during the week I will share my zero waste declutter progress and how I manage to act on these ideas, which hopefully I will.


Having a whole lot of pre-ordered books to sign and pack up today, I have managed to empty two boxes.  Unfortunately my cat, Smokey, had different ideas for the first box, but I started with a nice easy declutter of the growing gift bag collection.  Some to keep, some in the box for the charity shop.


Another coup, was a big box of envelopes, that had belonged to my grandfather.  I did wonder how I was ever going to use foolscap envelopes, but with a reel of sellotape and a bit of folding, I am managing to use them up to send out my books. Knowing that the first sales of my book are very likely to be people who are already on the path to zero waste, I feel the recipients will only appreciate the reuse element. (Well I guess they were once new, but that was very many years ago.  I think they might be older than I am!) 

More books to sign tomorrow - so what will be in the next box, I wonder? Slowly I will make my way through the mess and rehome, redeploy, mend and put away the contents.

That's my zero waste week day one.  How was yours?

Zero Waste Week -2016 - Day Five

I have been away for two days so my living out of the fridge and freezer for the week had to go on hold. I feel a bit cheated (only by my self, of course). So I plan to extend the eating from the fridge and freezer over the weekend and into next week. 

Yesterday we walked 16 miles along the Thames Path and then took four trains to get back to the car .. oh yes and getting to the station meant another mile and a half of walking. We discussed options for dinner that are quick and easy, but decided on fish and chips.

We are experimenting with gluten free for Mr Pitt so he chose chicken rather than fish. The chicken turned out to be a bit dry. So rather than risk wasting half of it he cut off a piece and put it back in the serving dish. We had planned to have chicken in white wine sauce on Monday night so we will add it to that and use a bit less of the chicken we have in the freezer. I decided to save a bit of my fish, which I put in a tub in the fridge. I ate it as a fish sandwich for brunch with some tomato ketchup this morning. We didn’t eat all the chips either, but we have long since had the habit of saving any spare chips to re-fry for another meal. You can even freeze them.

Today I took the apple sauce cake and the banana skin curry to our love food hate waste event.   A few people liked the idea of the apple sauce cake for their stock of apples - several of us have an apple tree in the garden and in one of the villages the parish council planted fruit trees along the road for people to help themselves to.

I was intrigued about the banana skin curry, but rather pleasantly surprised because having spent a couple of nights in the freezer and then been defrosted and reheated, all the flavours have come together beautifully.  Someone suggested making it with whole bananas which I think would work really well.

Day 4 waste - 60 grammes

Day 5 waste - - 16 grammes
A bit of tough chicken skin - pre-chewed 

Next week, I'm going foraging in my freezer.

Zero Waste Week - 2016 - Day Four

Yesterday's waste weighed in at 158 grammes. I had a cooking morning so there's  always a bit of waste as the by-product of that, even though I try to get every last bit of goodness out of everything.

Yesterday's baking

But yesterday as my fridge became clearer I found my first fridge casualty, a small piece of haloumi cheese that wasn't properly wrapped and had gone mouldy.

This amounted to around a third of the day's food waste. And this could have been avoided. I also found a couple of individual milk cartons.  I have no idea how these came to be in my fridge. I drink black coffee and herb tea so no milk required when out and about. I only have tea with milk if it is not from a plastic pot like this as I feel it is unnecessary waste. These pots rattle when I pick them up and I don't think they are meant to be milk powder. I will investigate tomorrow.

Fridge Lurkers

I had a bit of a delve in my freezer. It definitely needs some reorganisation even though Junior Daughter and I had a use it up session this summer. But I am away now for 2 days so that will be for next week.

My banana skin curry and apple sauce cake are for my Love Food Hate Waste event on Saturday when I meet up with the other LFHW champions to talk about what we have learnt over the year from events we've held. So last night's supper was a sausage casserole from the freezer which was taking up too much space in an over sized tub. That made room for the vegetable peel stock and some soup that made to use up the last of my broccoli including some extra stalks, some cauliflower and the rest of my lovely Oxford Blue, rind and all.

I served yesterday's casserole with some horseradish mash, so that was another jar finished. I had almost forgotten the delights of horseradish mash. Yummy!

It was very pleasing to see my dishwasher full of empty jars too.

It is great to see that loads of people are downloading Leftover Pie. I will be back to finish off the complete book on Monday. In the meantime please do let me know what you think. Here is the link again.

Yesterday's Food Waste - 158g

Zero Waste Week - 2016 - Day 3

Yesterday's food waste amounted to this, weighing in at 90 grammes.

But, there was also the tops and bottoms from some onions, the top and bottoms from carrots, and the 'core' of a couple of peppers from yesterday's vegetable curry, which I don't count as waste just yet as these are the kinds of things I cook up to make vegetable stock for soup or risotto.

Today it is all about bananas.  I had half a dozen bananas ranging from speckled brown to completely black, so I made the most of the information in the Zero Waste Week email today.

For breakfast, I tried out Rachelle's recipe for banana pancake.  I mushed up two very black and quite small bananas and then beat in one egg.  I then fried it dry in a pancake pan and had it with some jam - I have a lot of jam at the moment.  That is definitely one to do frequently. I wish I had known about this when Junior Daughter was doing her A levels.  She spent long hours revising at the dining room table and I would make her meals regularly because although she was perfectly capable of doing that herself, she was going for long periods saying she'd eat something in a minute.  I think if you are around and can plonk some nutritious food in front of your teenage children when they are revising it can only be a good thing.  Banana pancakes would be perfect for that.

Banana pancake with jam

I decided to have a morning away from my computer as my eyes are hurting from so much screen time.  So I used the time to catch up with the Be the Change podcasts that Rachelle Strauss has put together and to potter about in my kitchen, with a main aim of working out how to use up some of the jars that had been breeding in my fridge.

Inspired by the topic of bananas, in today's ZWW email, I wanted to have a go at a recipe from Shane Jordan's excellent book Food Waste Philosophy for banana skin curry.

In my talks about food waste in schools, when dealing with the concept of avoidable v. unavoidable food waste, I often used to say that only giraffes eat banana skins. I had no idea that they were edible food for us too.

So today was the day to try it out.  I looked at Shane's recipe, but oh dear.  I didn't have some of the vegetables in the recipe.  I had no leeks and no peppers, but I decided not to be put off.  One of the things that I've really tried hard to do in my new book, Leftover Pie : 101 Ways to Reduce your Food Waste is to encourage my contributors to use the term recipe loosely and I hope I can help people get into the idea that you can swap and change as long as you keep the proportions consistent and you give a thought to the basics of sweet, sour, salty, then all will be well.

I scurried off to my rapidly emptying fridge to see what I did have.  I had a sweet potato, a couple of courgettes, a yellow chilli, so I decided to give this a try.  I love the combination of herbs and spice in Shane's recipe and I did have all of that.  I knew I'd need to cook my curry for longer than the recipe states as I was cooking sweet potato which takes longer than peppers.

Ingredients for banana skin curry. I did peel the onion skins this time as
 I'm going to use them to make a vegetable stock.

I let my curry simmer for a good long time, and tasted it occasionally.  I felt it lacked a little sweetness.  While the curry was cooking I had been having a look at my mass of jars.  I had three jars that each had a bit of homemade apple sauce which I decided to use up to make an apple cake, like the recipe in my book, but with apple sauce on the bottom instead of apple slices.   It won't look as pretty, of course, but it will still taste good.

There was another jar, that looked a bit like apple sauce but maybe a bit more set than normal.  I tasted it a few times, wondering whether I could use it to add sweetness to my curry.  For some reason, I couldn't place the taste.  Yes it was sweet, but I wasn't convinced it was apple.  After a few goes at trying to work it out I realised it was mango chutney, which would be perfect for the curry.  It has worked.  The balance of sweet and spice is nice now.

Yay! That's another jar gone.

I took out yesterday's bits of peel that I'd put in a tub in the fridge and then combined with the onion peel I covered it with water and made some stock for the freezer.

Back to the bananas though, I cut up one of the bananas and popped it in the freezer, to make some of Many Mazliah's nice cream, which is in Leftover Pie.  I used another two bananas to make some banana and oatmeal cookies from a recipe on Wendy's Moral Fibres blog post.

Oh, yes, and I was planning to do a tuna mayo for lunch, but I had some iceberg lettuce left and I'll be out and about for the rest of the week so it needed to be eaten.  I spruced it up with some parsley and some basil leaves and lavender flowers, topped it off with some pesto croutons made from my gluten free bread disaster and had it with some cheese, oatcakes and the remains of another of the jars - some unidentified chutney.

Salad lunch today

I had lots of ideas from the Twitter Zero Waste Week discussion about what to do to make my gluten free bread disaster edible:  bread and butter pudding, croutons, bread crumbs etc.  The pesto croutons were delicious, despite the bread disaster, so I'm going to blitz up some of the loaf for breadcrumbs and cube the rest to turn into croutons another time.  These can go in the freezer until I need them.

Gluten-free bread disaster

One last think though, does anyone know how to make gluten free bread in a bread maker? What's the secret?

Oh yes, the book... Leftover Pie: 101 Ways to Reduce your Food Waste - you can get the first two chapters and eight lovely autumnal recipes. plus you can find out the inspiration behind my flowery salad.  Click on the link here and the special Zero Waste Week edition will be emailed to you for free.

Don't worry, I won't then send you loads of emails - if you read this blog, you know that I'm an infrequent blogger, except during Zero Waste Week when I make an extra special effort, so I'm not going to start news-lettering as well.  I hope you enjoy Leftover Pie!

Zero Waste Week - 2016 - Day Two

So today is all about using your loaf and clearing out the fridge.

My food habits changed a lot since the last Zero Waste Week all about food in 2013.  I learnt a lot from taking part and from being part of a group on a mission and it was a lot of fun because my daughters were both at home and we cooked up all sorts of things to use everything up.  Some things have since become regular family recipes.

But there's one habit that doesn't seem to have gone away... and that's the jars that breed in the back of my fridge, well all over my fridge actually.

Just look at what I'm faced with today!!  What am I going to do with all this lot, I wonder?

I woke up really early this morning despite a very late night (working on that little surprise that Rachelle and I have planned for you).  So when my ZWW email arrived, and I saw the zero waste week challenges for the day, I decided that I'd have to empty my fridge of jars to see if there was indeed anything lurking.

The bread challenge was easy.  I keep my bread in the fridge if I'm going to use it up soon, or in the freezer sliced, ready to pick out the exact number of slices I need.  I know people say you shouldn't keep bread in the fridge but I have never had a problem with it.  I do have a problem if I leave it out in the kitchen when my Rayburn is lit.  The kitchen gets very warm and cosy and just as I like the warm and cosy kitchen so does the bread mould.

I only had two crusts of bread in my fridge left over from cricket tea so I had those with toast and jam for breakfast.

While I was clearing out the jars from my fridge, I got out the rest of my spring onions (it's ok, no dentist appointment today) and some red pepper, a green chilli and a few other veg.  Yesterday I was going to make a vegetable curry, inspired by the #ZeroWasteWeek Twitter-Chatter .

But then I started worrying about all the milk I had, so opted for pasta with a cheese sauce, some fresh tomatoes from the garden and black olives and basil.  It was yummy!

Lunch is sorted in the form of the very round-about version of mushroom soup that I made yesterday to use up all my salad bits.  It just goes to show how much the eyes contribute to our perception of taste.  Now it looks like something familiar, I'm tasting it and finding it delicious.  So much so that I tasted it three or four times just now before I realised I was almost going to be eating my lunch just from taste-testing.

Looks like mushroom soup now!

That means, I'm going to cook up a vegetable curry for tonight.   I'm going to start it off sometime this afternoon so that I can enjoy the smell and let all the spices infuse nicely while I work.

In the meantime, when my mind slips away from the work in hand, which it is known to do on occasion, then I'll have a little think about what to do with the breeding jars!  Ideas please...

Zero Waste Week - 2016 - Day One

Yesterday I spent the day at Wychwood Forest Fair at Cornbury Park in Oxfordshire, talking about how to reduce food waste and how to compost at home with the help of my colleagues, the Master Composters.

It was a long day, and I had something important to finish off yesterday evening.  I think it was about half past ten when I eventual took off my walking boots and my Love Food Hate Waste apron (standard uniform for talks about food waste in the middle of a field!) and fell into bed.

Why did I wake up feeling like a six year old child on Christmas morning? Yes, because it was the start of Zero Waste Week 2016, which is all about reducing your food waste.  And this year, Zero Waste Week will be a bit different for me, because it is the first time I will be reading the emails for the first time each morning.

For the last few years I've seen the emails in advance, discussed them, lending my editing skills and my humble opinion and generally helping out in preparation for the week.  But this year, I've been totally in the dark about what's coming up in the daily emails, because I've been busy cooking up a little something... all will be revealed later in the week!

Earlier in the year, along with the rest of the merry band of Zero Waste Week blog ambassadors I set out my pledge for ZWW 2016.


I pledged to go "shopping in my fridge and my freezer" for the entire week.  My plan was to avoid buying any more food and just to see what I could rustle up with what I already had.

That, along with weighing and documenting any food waste is now my challenge for the week.

Wanting nothing to go to waste, I scurried off to the kitchen before an early start at my desk, to forage around for a waste saving breakfast.  There was a lonely scone, a bit past its best, but twenty seconds in the microwave, and some butter and home-made blackberry and elderberry jam and I was sorted.

Scone for breakfast? Of course, why ever not?

I read the Zero Waste Week email for Day One before even getting out of bed, so I knew that salad was on the agenda.  That couldn't have been more perfect for me, because guess what I had loads of in my fridge other than way too much milk.

My fridge on day one of Zero Waste Week- Hmm! that's a lot of milk.

I also needed a very quick to prepare lunch so I pulled out a tub of pre-cut salad of spring onions, cucumber, tomatoes, and peppers and added a handful of green salad leaves of various sorts from one of the many tubs of salad leaves (left over from that thing I'm "cooking up" for the middle of the week), pulling out a few leaves that were starting to wilt.  Inspired by today's blog post suggestion of salad soup, I decided to pop these wilted bits into a soup from the rest of the salad - a mix of leaves and herbs picked last Wednesday from my garden. I looked at the soup recipe, grabbed an onion, thought about peeling it and changed my mind. I roughly chopped it, peel on and sweated it down in some olive oil.  I then went to pull out all the bits and piece of salad from the fridge and look for anything that was a bit past its best in the salad drawers.  I shaved off the slightly browning edges of a cabbage and the same for a quarter of an iceberg lettuce.  I kept the rest of the iceberg lettuce for tomorrow, but popped it into some water to keep it fresh. I found some potato peel that I was saving up for making crisps and decided that would be quicker than chopping a potato but do the same job.  One thing I didn't have was any stock, but I did have some apple juice (left over from that project I've been working on for the middle of the week!).  I remembered that my aunt used to make a very nice leek, lettuce and apple soup so I thought I'd give it a go as a replacement for stock.

Salad lunch with a pot of dressing that was lurking at the back of the fridge
 from a pizza delivery a while ago, that Junior Daughter shared with her friends.
 There are carrot sticks hiding under the salad leaves, perfect for eating with the dressing.

Back to my desk with my salad lunch, the smell wafting from the kitchen, notes of mint and fennel, was divine.

Soup ingredients

I then had to dash out to the dentist this afternoon and rather regretted the spring onion!  When I got back I went to taste the soup - fortunately I'd remembered to turn off the hob before going out!  It was ok, but not delicious.  I tasted it a few times to try to detect what was wrong with it and decided that it had quite a kick of lemon grass and was slightly acidic.  What to do?  I decided to add a bit of sea salt and black pepper, and cook it a bit longer which improved things greatly, but it was still lacking a little something.  The recipe I'd remembered was leek, lettuce and apple but I had only added some onion and the green tops from some spring onions as I didn't have any leeks in the fridge.  But then I remembered that I'd saved some green tops from some leeks and a quick rummage in the freezer and I found a bag of these.  I popped these in just as they were, added a half teaspoon of chilli powder and left it to simmer while I went back to work.

When I went back to have a look at my soup - well have a taste really, I found it much improved, but there was still something wrong.  It did taste nice, but my head was still telling me it wasn't delicious and I realised the problem was the rather murky brown colour - green salad, brown potato skins and red onion is always going to end up a murky brown colour.  I felt it looked like mushroom soup, but with no mushrooms in it, the taste didn't fulfil expectation.

What to do?  Chop up some mushrooms.  I decided to leave them whole so it looked like an obvious mushroom soup.  I was a bit worried that I hadn't whizzed up the leek tops before throwing in the mushrooms - as the leaving them whole idea was an afterthought.  However, fifteen minutes later when I went to have another taste the leeks were totally cooked down, and the taste matched expectation.  It tasted of mushroom soup with a pleasant herby note on the finish.

I decided that would be tomorrow's lunch, as I was feeling a little stressed out by the four pints of milk in my fridge, one of which was dated today and definitely on the turn.  So I decided dinner would need to feature a cheese sauce: pasta with a blue cheese sauce, some quartered tomatoes from the garden and some black olives with a few leaves of basil on the top.

A quick use-it-up pasta supper

Total food waste today:

1 tea bag
the tiniest bit of the bottom of the onion
some olive stones

weighs in at 24 grams.

A letter for contributors to #LeftoverPie

Hello lovely food-lovers and eco-warriors,

This blog post is for all the lovely people who will be contributing recipes to my forthcoming book...

Thank you so much for agreeing to contribute a recipe to Leftover Pie: 101 Ways to Reduce Your Food Waste. I hope in this blog post I can give you enough details in just a few short paragraphs so you can decide what recipe to contribute and so you can send it with the minimum time and effort on your part as, being one of the movers and shakers of the food waste revolution, I’m sure you are very busy.

Like my previous book, 101 Ways to Live Cleaner and Greener for Free, Leftover Pie is written for teens and their families. Its aim is to teach young people about the importance of food waste reduction, look at how we have arrived at food waste crisis point and share tips and recipes to help reduce the amount of food that is wasted.

Leftover Pie needs recipes that are not too prescriptive. The idea is to help people use up things they may often have left over, so a bung it all kind of recipe and a bit of flexibility saying you can use this, or this or this, will work well.

I'll be including ideas for using up gluts from the garden, seasonally abundant produce, things that are easy to grow in a garden or a pot on the windowsill, things that we can easily forage for without too much expert knowledge as well as meals we can make by going foraging in our fridge and freezer!

I also want to include recipes for simple stand-by meals entirely from store cupboard ingredients. For some people I have guided them towards specific things I’d like from them, and others I haven’t. You are very welcome to contact me to discuss your ideas before you decide what to send, but we would need to do that soon.  If I have mentioned something in particular, but you'd rather send something else, that's fine. I really want this book to be full of favourites, so that the passion shines through.  Our job is to inspire, just like with any cookery book, and just because we are using something up that might have been wasted, we want it to be delicious, because we know it can be and all food is precious and gorgeous even when it is past its prime.

I realise that by not being prescriptive about what people send in I may get 37 different recipes for banana bread, but I'll cross that bridge in a few weeks.  I have faith that all will be well.

There will also be an opportunity for people to read the text of the book and to chip in if they would like. I want to raise awareness about all the wonderful things going on to help cut down the amount of food we waste and to get people thinking differently about food in general so there will be opportunities to include text about all the wonderful organisations, causes, companies who are part of the sustainable food movement. A lot has changed since I wrote the main text of the book nearly two years ago, so I’ll be rapidly updating and adding. If you want to make sure that something you are passionate about is included, don’t wait for me to come to you, you can come to me and I will do my very best to spread the word accordingly. So, get in touch, ask questions, challenge me (let’s make sure I don’t miss too much important stuff, right?) and, oh yes, encouragement too, will be most gratefully received.

Thank you

Anna


How to contribute: Please email me at anna@dustbindiet.com
I will need your contribution by 30th June 2016. Thank you.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please include:
· Your Name
· Your Restaurant/Website/Company/Cause or any other information you would like me to show in the book alongside your name
· Name of Recipe
· Why you have chosen this recipe
· Recipe details