No Waste Within

A new campaign is being launched by Zoe Morrison of Ecothrifty Living blog and Emma Dawson of The Food Brood to highlight the issue of food that gets wasted during food photography sessions and to champion a movement of food bloggers, food stylists and photographers who refuse to waste food.

I first read about the waste that goes on within the food writing industry in Shane Jordan's book, Food Waste Philosophy. When I was writing my own book, Leftover Pie, there was no way I was going to allow that to happen. Before my first photo shoot session I said to the food stylist that all of the food was going to be eaten. I am very glad that I found people to work with who care as much as I do about food. Part of the planning that day involved planning what we could eat when, everything was cooked according to the recipes as they are in the book and the tweaking and rearranging that did get done was with strict instructions that the food would still be edible and yummy! and Oh   ...boy! There was a lot of tweaking and rearranging.  I had no idea how long it would take to get the perfect amount of pickle to run down the side of the jar!
Most of the photos on my blogs, both here and on Leftoverpie.co.uk are photos I snap while cooking everyday food that my family are about to eat.  But stories I was told as we were getting the perfect picture of my scones were horrifying. Leonie's fridge and freezer were packed full of f ood she had rescued from photo shoots.  I even took some kale  home with me. She said it would take her weeks to get through all the kale she had rescued so I felt obliged to help out.

I  know this is a much needed campaign and it is great to see it being well supported by food bloggers across the UK. Please do share it widely.  And join in with the hashtag #nowastewithin.

I am always surprised when people ask me if we ate the 'Leftover Pie.' Of course we ate it!

Here is my pledge...

“I promise that no food waste was created by the development, cooking, styling and photographing of this recipe and that, where it wasn’t possible for me to enjoy it myself, I have redistributed, repurposed, retained or recycled the food.”

Foraging fortnight

Autumn is a great time for foraging.  I’ve been picking apples, blackberries, pears and plums from my garden and hedgerows.  I’m planning to go blackberrying again and I’m hoping to add in some elderberries too.

We are also lucky to have a vegetable patch which is producing carrots, spring onions, beetroot, courgettes, celery, beans, and spinach at the moment. But it isn’t just the outdoor foraging that I want to invite you to think about. Now is a really great time to go foraging in your fridge and freezer. What better time to cut down on spending than after your summer holiday and before you start thinking about Christmas. Read more...

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. 

Read more...

Guides cook up a feast

Yesterday evening 2nd Kidlington Guides were challenged to cook up a feast from the food they could find that needed using up in their fridges.  It was suggested that they bring any leftovers or odd vegetables and that the idea was they shouldn't buy anything specially.  This was about foraging in our fridges or cupboards to make a meal from what we already had, with the idea that we could reduce waste as we did so.

We talked a bit about the food waste issue and the extent of the problem.   It was encouraging that 17 out of 27 households were using their kitchen caddies for their food waste, keeping it separate from general waste.  We discussed some of the reasons behind why others didn't use their kitchen caddies.  Three families didn't have one, so I suggested that they contact the local council to ask for a kitchen caddy as they are free to all households and they can ask for one to be delivered. Another family didn't use a caddy but put any food waste always straight into the outside brown compost bin, so that's perfect.  Maybe the others might have a think about whether they could use their food caddy too.  There are people who don't like the idea of using food waste caddies in their kitchen. Putting their food waste straight into their outdoor compost bin after every meal might be a solution for them.

On to the cooking...

We had a table full of ingredients to work with and the Guides split into four groups each picking some ingredients and talking about what they would make with those ingredients.

We had dried egg noodles in various forms - clearly a popular store cupboard essential.  These made a great base for various dishes.  We had some leftover cooked vegetables which included mashed potato, peas and carrots.  We had an iceberg lettuce, 5 tomatoes, two thirds of a pepper, about three quarters of a cucumber, some fresh broccoli florets and stalk, a potato, one and a half avocados and half a lemon.

We had some tinned carrots,  part of a tin of sweetcorn - correctly stored in an airtight container rather than in the tin and a pack of chopped tomatoes.

We had some cauliflower and broccoli cup-a soup, some pancake mix, some Orio cookies and some white chocolate chips and a box of cheese crackers.

I brought the green leafy ends of some leeks, some green ends of spring onions and a box of assorted vegetable peelings which included onion skin, the core and seeds and stalk of two red peppers, some celeriac, swede and carrot ends and peel.

Here are some of the things that were made:

Dips with crackers and potato wedges
This group made an avocado dip and a yoghurt dip to eat with the crackers and some oven cooked potato wedges. They made sure they scraped out all of the avocado from the skin before putting the skin ready for the compost bin.
The potato wedges were cooked in a little oil with a sprinkling of sea salt.

We missed a trick here as a perfect accompaniment to the dips would have been the stalk of the broccoli. You peel off the tough outer edge of the stalk and then cut the inner bit into strips like you would cut carrot, celery  or cucumber and it is delicious and very good for you.

Avocado salad
The avocado salad was made from mashed up avocado, chopped tomato, lemon juice and chopped up ends of spring onion.  It was very tasty.

Pasta salad
This was made from a "mug shot" instant pasta dish combined with some chopped ends of spring onion.  The spring onion really added to it visually and taste wise as it gave it a lift. A good twist of black pepper was a nice addition to this too.

Pancakes with Orio cookies and white chocolate chips
The pancakes were using up a packet of pancake mix, which was a just add water kind of recipe, but it became so much more with the addition of Orio cookies and white chocolate chips.  Some interesting lessons were learnt here.  The cookies turned the mix a light brown colour.  This meant that it was hard to tell when the pancake was cooked.  The girls doing the cooking also had their doubts about whether it would be nice.  The colour didn't look appealing. We decided we needed to taste it, so I was the guinea pig.  On tasting I could tell the pancake wasn't cooked enough.  So we cooked it some more and then I tasted it again and it was good to go.  The girls weren't totally happy with their creation, so I suggested they cut up small pieces and take it round to people to taste.  The came back saying people loved it.  Taking a small piece and tasting meant people were judging by taste not look and they enjoyed what they tasted so that gave the girls confidence to cook two more pancakes to share round.  "Don't judge a book by its cover" was an important lesson here and we talked about the importance of tasting your cooking as you go.

Noodle soup with sweetcorn
The base for the noodle soup was a packet of super noodles with a stir in sauce. Then the vegetable peel stock and some of the leftover peas and sweetcorn were added. Some carrot was peeled and pre-cooked in the microwave before adding into the soup.  I heard the word delicious get mentioned but didn't get to taste it myself.  It did smell very good.  I added the carrot peel to the vegetable stock.

Mixed Salad
The mixed salad was chopped iceberg lettuce, cucumber, tomato and sweetcorn.

I took on the challenge of making sure nothing got wasted from what was left. Here is what I have made so far.

I mixed the rest of the yoghurt - about a desert spoonful - with some porridge oats for breakfast.

I used one of the packets of pasta in sauce and cooked the rest of the broccoli.  This made a tasty lunch.

Last night I kept the remaining stock and added in the mashed potato, the rest of the peas.  There were a few stray noodles in the stock as we used the same colander to strain the noodles and then the stock.  There were a couple of loose florets of broccoli on a chopping board as we cleared away so they went into my soup pot and there was some of the cooked carrot left, so that will be a nice addition to give sweetness to the soup.

I brought all this mix to the boil,  and then simmered it for 15 minutes to let the flavours come together and then whizzed it with a hand blender.  The next important step was to taste it. It needed some seasoning so I added about a teaspoon and a half of salt, tasting after each half teaspoon, and a generous amount of black pepper.  I then added in the egg noodles, cooked carrot and leek ends that one group had prepared.  The soup was lovely and I now have two portions in the freezer and one in the fridge for tomorrow.

This evening I am cooking another batch of soup using the cooking water from the broccoli I cooked for lunch and the salad off-cuts from Guides.   I have also put in the ends of some asparagus that I had in the fridge.  The ends take a long time to cook, so I always trim them otherwise you get either overcooked asparagus tips or chewy bits on the end.  I think the ends work better blended in a soup.  

I have added the remaining lemon juice to a lemon cake and then I put the lemon in the freezer as I will candy the lemon peel when I have a few more used lemons.

I read the ingredients of the remaining pack of pasta and because it contains cream powder I can't eat it due to an allergy. When you find yourself with food that you can't use for whatever reason you can offer it on the food sharing app Olio
.

The cupboard clean out

In the second week of the www.ecothriftyliving.com decluttering challenge, Zoe has tasked us with clearing out our store cupboard and trying to use up those items that are still ok to eat after the best before date.
Here is my cupboard this morning.

I know more or less what is on it, Including a couple of things that I know are way out of date. I have no idea why they are still unused.
One ageing item is a time of evaporated milk. I used to use this to make ice cream as I can't eat cream.  I haven't made ice cream for a couple of years now but I have certainly made it since the purchase of this tin so I can only assume poor stock control as the reason it is still lurking at the back of my cupboard.

I am going to do some research before deciding whether my tin can be turned into ice cream or whether it is better off in my wormery. One thing is for certain I will definitely not be 'binning' it. I will at least open the tin and if the contents aren't edible then I will get the remaining value I can from the milk and the tin.

As for the rest, I found a few items nearing their bb date so I packed them up to take them on holiday with me next week.

Then after cleaning the cupboard I put anything open or dated in 2017 on the bottom shelf, the 2018 on the next shelf up and 2019 and beyond at the top.  If I do this once a year all should be well.

Spot the difference?

Want to join in the declutter? There are plenty of ideas being shared on the facebook group. Here is the link.

Reducing your food waste with help from Facebook

I have recently joined a new Facebook group run by Zoe Morrison, author  of Eco Thrifty Living blog, with a little bit of help from me.

The Facebook group is for anyone who is interested in wasting less of their food and making even the food that many people might regularly throw away into something tasty.

Tomorrow, Monday 6th March, Zoe is introducing a challenge:

The #STILLGOOD DECLUTTERING CHALLENGE!

Zoe is challenging the Reduce Your Food Waste Facebook group members (and readers of her blog and mine!) to have a clear out and use up anything that is approaching or beyond its 'Best Before' date.

Starting on Monday 6th March, the areas to be tackled are:

Week 1: drinks - both dried and in liquid form e.g. tea, coffee, alcohol, juice and so on.

Week 2: tins, jars and dried goods e.g. flour, rice, pasta, herbs, spices.

Week 3: Freezer foods and/or the condiments in your fridge

Week 4: The food you keep outside your kitchen - e.g. in your office drawer, in your car, your secret stash of munchies :)

I decided to get a head start on next week's challenge and just have a look at the drinks, starting with the tea and coffee drawer.

I had no idea that I had 5 tubs of cocoa powder.  I do make a lot of cakes as I make cricket teas throughout the summer. So I know that this will get used up. Two of the pots were no doubt brought home from the Junior and Senior Daughters' houses and each had less than half a tub. So I decided to set to work and use some of it. We were going for dinner at a friend's house so I made some truffles to take with us. I had an ageing but in date tin of condensed milk, so I used three table spoons of cocoa powder in the tin of condensed milk, which I heated up until it bubbled, then added about 50g of unsalted butter, which you stir in until it melts. Then when the mixture is cool enough you just roll it into balls with your hands. It is surprisingly mess free.  I then rolled the balls in more cocoa powder and I coated a couple with some candied peel I made last weekend.

They went down well last night and I have more for after roast dinner today.  Gutted, Sis, that you can't join us today. I will try to save you a couple.

These used up the two tubs that were started.

However, I think I need to get a bit more chocolate cookery done as I have some dubious looking packets of drinking chocolate that look past their best and a tub of Nesquik that my nephew brought here a couple of years ago. Now what am I going to make with that? Ideas please.

Here is the link for anyone who would be interested in joining our Facebook group.

Reduce your food waste!386 members

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.

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

The plastic challenge - week three

This week's shop was pretty successful.  I bought quite a bit of meat including some for my grandmother.  She decided she wanted hers in a container rather than in a plastic bag - it's catching on.  Fortunately our local butcher is extremely supportive and is more than happy to fill up my own containers.

We went shopping on Saturday for some more vegetables, and the one thing we didn't come back with (aside from peas of course) was a cauliflower.  We were in Waitrose and all the cauliflowers are in a plastic bag.  We know that it is the same in Sainsbury's.  The last cauliflower I bought was in Whole Foods Market where they are not in plastic bags.  We could maybe have found one at the market, unpackaged but we decided we would do without as we had bought sprouts in one of our own Onya Weigh bags.

The one bit of plastic we came back with this week was a tub of Philadelphia cheese.  I've decided this purchase is exempt from my plastic challenge as I buy it for making cheesecake or tiramisu which is a good way of using up leftover/stale cake.  We had half a chocolate log in the fridge which had really been there long enough so it got mashed up into the base for tiramisu and soaked in Tia Maria and strong coffee.  Then I whipped up the Philadelphia with some icing sugar and spread that on top and covered it in grated chocolate. It is now all eaten up as pudding after Sunday lunch.

Making tiramisu out of the leftover chocolate log

There was some extra chocolate sauce left over from the chocolate log, and so I turned this into a fridge cake.  This was another plastic challenge as I have up to now made my fridge cake by lining a loaf tin with cling film.  This was easily overcome though, by using a pork pie tin which has a loose bottom, lined round the edge with some Bake-o-glide.  It worked really well and was easier than the cling film method.

My new method for making fridge cake

So why do I consider the Philadelphia cheese packaging to be ok?  Well, it is most certainly reusable in our house.  I always keep the empty pots, wash them out and reuse them for example for snacks like peanuts and raisins or grated carrot and celery sticks which I take when I am working away from home and Junior Daughter takes to school.  There is no other plastic packaging other than the tub itself.

Mid week I decided I needed to buy my cat food as they say you should introduce new cat food gradually.  I did buy the Countrywide brand and the cats like it. So again more plastic, but at least it is in a useful bag.

Here's the Pitt Purchased plastic tally to date:

2 toothpaste tubes with lids
2 plastic bubbles from the battery packaging

In addition, but with plans to make use of the plastic:

1 tub with lid from Philadelphia cheese
1 bag from cat food washed out, dried and back in use.

I have also pulled out of my plastic store a small plastic bag when I've needed one. It was from apples. I'll be keeping this and no doubt reusing it again, because apples from now on will only be purchased loose.

The Pig Idea Feast

Walking through Trafalgar Square today didn't seem the same without a friendly piglet to accompany me.  Last week I lent a hand at The Pig Idea Feast in Trafalgar Square, where I was tasked with enticing the public to join in the festivities with the help of Norris, one of the piglets pictured below.

Photo credit:Diana Jarvis & Karolina Webb

The Pig Idea team gave away over 5000 portions of porky delights at their feast on 21st November. All the pork served, from nose to tail, had been reared by the team at Stepney City Farm on a healthy diet of spent brewer's grains, whey, unsold fruit and veg and okara (a tofu byproduct), all collected locally - food that would have otherwise been wasted.

I'm sure all the food was delicious, but speaking from first hand experience, I can certainly testify to the deliciousness of the spicy pork tacos served by the Wahaca team.

After my leafleting trip round the local area with Norris the piglet I was tasked with gathering pledges in support of the Pig Idea.

As I chatted to people while they ate their lunch, enjoying the glorious winter sunshine, I was surprised how many people hadn't realised (or maybe hadn't remembered) that there has been a ban, for the last ten years, on feeding food waste to pigs.  Most people seemed appalled at the idea that pigs were often being fed on soya that had been grown half way round the world when there was so much they could have been fed on that was just going to waste.

Many times I was asked why, when we've been feeding our food waste to pigs for centuries, did we have to stop.

The ban was a response to the outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease in 2001.  As I understand it, all food whoever you are feeding it to, whether that's people or pigs, has to be treated in the correct way.  If we are cooking the food, we have to cook it properly, ensuring that it is cooked to the correct temperatures and for long enough.  We have to be careful when we reheat foods and we have to store them properly.

Here's some information from The Pig Idea that explains more.

'It was tentatively concluded that the FMD outbreak originated on a farm that was illegally feeding its pigs unprocessed restaurant waste. It was originally intended to be a temporary measure, but has remained in place ever since.

As a result of the ban, farmers have had to find alternative sources of pig feed, mostly from ‘virgin’ materials - crops like soya, maize and wheat.

A return to the practice of feeding waste food to pigs would have a number of major social, environmental and economic benefits:

      Liberate food supplies, particularly cereal crops, so that these can be eaten by people instead of being fed to pigs;

      Lower feed costs for pig farmers, and so help to protect the beleaguered British pig industry;

      Avoid the economic and environmental costs of disposing of food waste, including dumping food waste in landfill sites and leaving it to rot which produces methane, a powerful greenhouse gas;

      Protect landscapes rich in biodiversity, such as the precious Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado grassland, that are under pressure to grow crops to feed pigs;

      Create jobs and revenue in the new eco-feed industry that will be needed to collect, treat and distribute surplus food so that it can be fed to pigs.

Is it safe?

Cooking leftover food renders it safe for pigs, and also for chickens, killing pathogens such as Foot and Mouth Disease and Classical Swine Fever. Pigs and chickens are omnivorous animals, evolved to eat all the kinds of food that humans eat, and there is no evidence that feeding them properly treated food waste is unhealthy either to the animals, or to the humans that eat their meat.' 

You can still pledge your support on the Pig Idea Website: http://thepigidea.org/get-involved.html