10 top tips for reducing food waste

I’m often asked for my top 10 tips on reducing food waste, so here you have them.

1. The big number one tip has to be…  Buy less food! Try to think of each shopping expedition as one where you will buy the minimum amount of food to get by rather than one where you are going to fill your trolley and pack your fridge full to bursting.  It is a small change in mindset that makes a huge difference. 

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Five-of-your-ten-a-day soup

After hearing last week that a recent study is suggesting we all eat 10 portions of fruit and veg every day for the good of our health I keep hearing people say they used to struggle with even 5-a-day.

Five-a-day is doable for me, but 10...definitely  a stretch. Last Thursday with a big effort and a twitter challenge I managed nine, but then for the last few days it has been down at five or six. However, today Mr Pitt made 5-a-day soup for lunch. We thought we were pretty good at making soup anyway, but recently we had a day at the Raymond Blanc Cookery School and this simple soup inspired by Maman Blanc was one of the dishes we cooked.

It is a great was to use up all the veg in your fridge. The basic recipe is to sweat some onion in a bit of rape seed oil (or a mixture of rape seed oil and butter). Chop your veg into pieces of roughly the same size and then add into the sweated onion,  adding the veg that take longest to cook first, adding just enough water to cover the veg. You don't need any stock.

Season with salt and pepper to taste and just before serving add a good handful of fresh chopped herbs. At the cookery school we added chervil, but we don't grow that, so today it was thyme from our pot on the kitchen window sill.

The veg was celery, parsnip, carrot, butternut squash, cauliflower leaves (the white part from the centre of the leaves) and onion. If you want to make sure you are getting your 5-a-day you could weigh out your veg portions, but this is now going to be my go to recipe for what is left in the fridge.

My challenge for 2017

I love this time of year. I love Christmas and New Year and all the family get-togethers.  We have traditional Christmas dinner of turkey and pork and all the trimmings.

We then have a big buffet dinner to use up all the cold meat and pickles and turn the veg into Bubble and Squeak.

We make patés and curry and stock for the freezer and this year because we were away shortly after Christmas we put a bit of leftover sliced meat into the freezer.

After the extravagance of Christmas and New Year I love the frugality of January too.  I always set myself some kind of challenge for the year, in some way related to reducing waste or reallocating resources: buying no clothes for a year except second hand, buying nothing in single use plastic packaging, giving away 10 books a month and buying none new - these things have all featured as yearly challenges and I enjoy them.

This January I decided to have a USE IT UP month so we are living out of the freezer and plan to completely empty it.

Our first meal back at home in 2017 involved making a soup from the few bits of veg we had left in the fridge. For this I got out some stock from the freezer. The soup consisted of a chopped onion, skin still on and some chopped leak ends - the green leaves - and a couple of stalks of celery. There was a bag containing some cauliflower leaves and stalk so that went in along with the stock, once the celery, onion and leak had sweated down. I then chopped up a couple of parsnips keeping the skin on and a carrot.  I still had a few sprouts and carrots and more celery left for the weekend but the veg drawer was otherwise empty.

I also came back home to about two thirds of a pint of old milk.  Normally my Dad would have collected the milk from my fridge and used it up.  I do the same when he goes away.  But between us we must have forgotten.  So I decided to make a batch of herb scones to use up the sour milk.   It would also be an additional something to take to another family get-together at the weekend where we had promised to bring lunch with us.

Herb scones to use up some sour milk

For dinner we used up some sausages from the freezer. I must have frozen them in a hurry as there were eight sausages in the tub. With only three of us at home I had a feeling we wouldn't eat them all but it is very easy to use up cooked sausages so we cooked them all. The next day we remembered that we had frozen some leftover toad-in-the-hole, so we dug deep and found that. We added the extra sausages from the day before and used up the gravy we'd had with our sausage and mash and there was plenty for the three of us. It inspired Junior Daughter to have a go at toad-in-the-hole at uni. Turned out very well by the looks of it.

I often have lots of stock in my freezer and of course with a turkey at Christmas we have plenty of stock from that.  Each day we've been raiding the freezer either for soup or for stock to make soup.

Mr Pitt has made various turkey based soups for lunch and we've been eating it with the herb scones.

We've also had burgers and that helped with an interesting challenge for the Pitt family - some processed cheese slices.  This is not something we normally buy, but acquired these after a cricket club barbecue, not wanting them to go to waste, of course.  So we bought some salad to go with our freezer raids and had melted cheese over some pork burgers.

The freezer is slowly emptying and so far, we've only had one casualty.  We thought it might be hummus, but it was the big sin of not labelling what you put in the freezer.  Once something defrosts you can usually tell what it is, but this was just a grey blob of something mushy with no smell.  If it was hummus once, it clearly wasn't great hummus.  We decided the best place for this was the compost heap.

In preparation for our family buffet, we had a cook up evening. It was fun finding things we could use up.  We wondered what we cold do with our slices of cold meat.  There wasn't a lot left, and I felt the ideal thing would be vol au vents, but the freezer didn't reveal any ready made puff pastry.  I always make my own short crust pastry as its quick and easy and always delicious, but I haven't made puff pastry since I made it in a cookery class at school at the age of 10.

Time to get out the cookery book bible.  Yes, it is a complete faff, but actually it isn't hard.  I learnt a few things, like leaving the pastry thicker for vol au vents than you would for a pie crust or sausage rolls.  I'll have to have another go soon to try and improve. They went down very well... and besides what's the point in making home made anything that just looks like it is shop bought.  Shame I forgot to take a photo when they were made up - and the evidence has now all been eaten.

I had made a large mince pie on Boxing Day, which we forgot all about, so we had left it in an airtight cake box in our porch - which acts as a spare fridge over the winter (well most of the year round, in fact).  We had a reasonable stock of eggs in the fridge so I made a batch of short crust pastry to make a quiche as the main event for the lunch.  What to put in it?  We had some feta cheese and there was some cooked gammon from the freezer.   I had frozen some broccoli before going away so I put that in too and there we have it - broccoli, feta and gammon quiche.

I had a bit of pastry left over from the quiche and wondered what could go in it.  We had some paté in the freezer, so we took that out and I layered it into the centre of the rolled out oblong of pastry and rolled it up to make a kind of sausage roll.  We forgot to take it with us for lunch next day, which was a happy surprise on Sunday when we wanted a little snack for lunch, before a roast dinner in the evening.

To sum up the spread for the buffet we had:

• broccoli, gammon and feta quiche, 
• turkey and pork and sweetcorn vol au vents in a white wine sauce
• herb scones with butter
• pork pie (made by our local butcher and bought uncooked and frozen)
• lattice mince pie for pudding

Not bad for a use-it-up freezer raid!

The freezer delving continues and I think on tonight's menu we are making a sort of butternut squash, lentil, bacon and feta cheese lasagna, but instead of using lasagna sheets, we are going to substitute some broken tortilla wraps from the freezer.

There will be more soup, no doubt, but what else will we find, I wonder?  I think it is going to take us at least another week or two after this one and then we will move on to the cupboards.

But, there's more to the story... what started as a practical decision to use up the contents of the freezer so it can get a thorough clean out and defrost, has led me onto more use-it-up ideas.  I had a big box in my bedroom full of various toiletries.  That has been pulled out and I've been using up bits and pieces from there.

The biggest clear up for 2017, however, is going to be digital.  I decided that my big 2017 challenge would be a digital detox.  I'll tell you more about that another day.

Here's to 2017.  Let's make it a great year!

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.

#WasteLessSaveMore

Last week I was invited to speak at the Discovery Communities Live event at The Silk Mill in Derby - an event organised by YearHere in conjunction with Sainsbury's #WasteLessSaveMore campaign and the town of Swadlincote.

I decided that the most appropriate thing I could talk about was my experience of taking part in Zero Waste Week back in September 2013, when it was all about reducing food waste.  So I took a look back at my blog posts for the week to remind me about why I took part, what I did and what I learnt from it.

It was an enlightening experience reading back over past blog posts and it really highlighted how much my family has changed behaviour over the years and managed to create lasting waste reduction habits. I wish I'd counted the number of times I asked myself: "Did we really do that?"

One of my fellow speakers, Chris King, who is photographing and documenting the people and organisations who are tackling the food waste problem, asked me what was the worst food waste I've ever seen and immediately I thought about one of the images in the slides I was going to show to accompany my talk - my cheese drawer from 2013.

The seriously mature cheese collection in my fridge
 at the start of Zero Waste Week 2013

One of the things I found so useful about Zero Waste Week, was that it got me thinking about why I wasted food.  I realised that I was the only person in my family who ate any cheese other than cheddar so decided there was no point in buying an array of cheeses when I had friends for dinner as the cheese would generally end up like the picture above. So I changed my buying habits and bought a couple of different cheddars for my cheese selection. It was a simple decision to make. Several years later I find that Senior Daughter has developed a taste for Brie and Camembert, so now I can add another variety knowing it won't get wasted. But still, I keep it simple and just offer a very limited choice.

Another big change I made to my buying habits also revolves around parties.  If we had a summer get-together we used to invite people to bring whatever meat they wanted to cook on the barbecue. Generally what would happen is that every couple/family would bring meat enough for three families - either because they couldn't decide what they fancied to eat - or they were overtaken with a generosity of spirit - or maybe both.  It was a food waste disaster every time - well in fact more than that - it was a waste disaster altogether alien to our Zero Waste  lifestyle.  Again we learnt to simplify the offer.  We now provide just sausages and burgers - locally made from local meat.  We tell guests they don't need to bring anything, which saves them time and money, and saves me from the abundance of packaging and wasted food.  I take my cake boxes to the butchers so what I buy goes straight into those with no plastic bags. The burgers get cooked from frozen a few at a time as and when there are people wanting them.  The sausages are bought fresh, so that any spares can be frozen (in family sized quantities and used from the freezer). Again we only cook a few at a time. This way very little extra is cooked - and it is usually all eaten during the evening or put away for breakfast the next day.  Simple and high quality is the rule and it works.

Several people said this picture resonated with them after my talk.
It was clearly food for thought!

As with a lot of times when I talk at events I am often asked what my children think of my/our Zero Waste lifestyle and the Discovery Communities Live event was no exception.  It is really now that my children are making their own way and their own lives that I am really seeing the impact of life without a bin. We regularly have discussions about how to use up ingredients and I frequently get photos of their creations as they make the most of their food. I really hope that the work of Swadlincote and the other towns that have been working on innovative food waste projects as part of the #WasteLessSaveMore campaign can reach families and young people to inspire the kinds of conversations I am lucky enough to have with my daughters. We must engage with our teenagers on the subject of wasting less over the next few years. We need to move away from seeing food as a low value disposable commodity stacked high on a supermarket shelf, to something of great importance to our health and social well-being, that deserves the time for a conversation about where it has come from, who has made it and how, and at what cost to the planet.  We need to love our food and care about how it is produced and we need to be doing that whether we are 9, 19 or 90.  Let's take time to talk about what we put on our table and why.  A great place to start (or just to carry on the conversation) could be to sign up to join Zero Waste Week 2016 and involve the whole family.  Lots of people who were at the Discovery Communities Live event last Tuesday have signed up already.  I hope lots more will do so over the coming weeks and months, so we can carry on the conversations started and turn some of those conversations into actions.

There were many innovative ideas shared at the event, lots of ideas that were taken away by food waste reduction champions, by people from local councils, by entrepreneurs and by representatives from Sainsbury's.  The highlight of the day, for me, was the delicious food on offer made from food that would be otherwise wasted.  The Real Junk Food Project made a wonderful lunch from food that would have been wasted.  There were several delicious samples from food producers who were taking otherwise waste produce and creating something yummy from it.

Here's some of the delicious food and drink available at the 'Discovery Zone' - all products that are made from ingredients that might have otherwise been wasted.  All this shows just how much we could be doing to make the most of the food we produce and the carbon footprint that it takes.