If you’re looking for some extra space in your budget,
you’ll often find that eating out and grocery expenses are the obvious
candidates for some careful pruning. While we can often think there is
little room to move on our grocery budget,
it’s worthwhile thinking about how much food we waste. If we can use
all the food we purchase, the benefit to our wallets will be
significant. Here are some ideas for keeping food wastage to a minimum,
complete with tasty recipes.
Start Small
There are a couple of essential changes you can make to improve your
food wastage, even before the food hits the table. Try making recipes to
exactly suit your family, including serving initially smaller portions
and allowing people to have seconds. The other option is to make a
larger batch and freeze the bulk of it, to serve within a couple of days
or use as lunches.
Set Up Your Kitchen
Our grandparents would have been appalled with the perfectly good
food we throw away. I can remember being in Italy and a woman in a store
grabbed the chook, cut of it’s head and it’s feet with the largest
knife I had ever seen, removed all the gizzards and then proceeded to
wrap the liver, kidney and chicken feet into a separate parcel, to “make
soup for the children”. My mum accepted politely, but I don’t think she
could quite bring herself to follow the instructions. I’m not
suggestion we all go that far, but there are certainly huge advances we
could make in how we use food. Always keep a close eye on use-by dates,
be sure to note down anything that’s going out of date soon and needs to
be used. For all organic matter that you don’t use, compost is a good
financial option. Aim to halve what you throw in the garbage bin at the
end of every week.
Frugal Desserts
Stale bread in bread and butter pudding (layer with butter, sultanas,
adding milk and egg until covered, then bake) is my favourite way to
use old bread. In fact, I love it so much sometimes, I get excited if
there looks to be any opportunity the bread might get too old. The same
is true of rice pudding. Using day old rice, heat butter in a pan and
coat rice with it. Then add around one litre of milk and 2 tablespoons
of sugar, bring to simmer. Whatever spices tickle your fancy (cinnamon,
cloves, a solid dose of masala), add them. Then put pudding into a
casserole dish, bake at 140 degrees for 2 hours and voila! Leftover
heaven.
Pies
Pies are the perfect answer to a leftover conundrum. For leftover
meat and potatoes, use in a pot pie, covered with puff pastry. It’s
delicious and no one will suspect they’re eating humble leftovers. For
leftover veggies, a quiche with a killer sour cream pastry is your
go-to.
Slow-Cooked Stew
It’s not called Irish stew for nothing, the people in green were
completely in sync when it came to using up ingredients. The difference
in taste is not about using the freshest thing in your fridge. You can
use the carrots, potatoes, beans bought optimistically at Coles, and any
beef cheeks on offer. The key to a gourmet stew is time, and lots of
it.
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