In May 2008, the Waste and Resources Action programme conducted a study that found the average household throws away 18% of all food purchased. Families with children waste on average 27%. This is staggering news when with today’s food shortages, environmental effects and financial difficulties it makes sense for us to look for ways to make our food go further.
In the days of our grandparents and great-grandparents this was often a permanent way of life. Leftovers from the Sunday roast could be turned into soups, pies, stews and other nutritious and cost effective meals for another few days. One free range chicken can last for at least three meals for a family of four. Think Sunday roast, then risotto or stir fry and then soup, for example.
Everyone has their favourite ways to use up leftovers but
here are a few ideas not everyone might have thought of :-
Pasties: Many the dregs of a stew or
roast dinner leftovers have been saved by these. Just buy shortcrust pastry
(it’s cheaper from the freezer cabinet) roll out to approx 5mm thick,
cut around a saucer and fill one side with your leftovers. Fold, press edges
with a fork, brush with beaten egg and bake for about 20 minutes. These work
beautifully with curry too. Freeze them, and you can then take them out to
defrost before popping in your packed lunch. Cost: approx 50p each.
Bubble and Squeak: great for breakfast, makes the most of your leftover vegetables, especially the greens – and also means you don’t waste that one of your 5-a-day! Just mash up with some left over roast potatoes and fry in a little butter or olive oil. Works best with sprouts or cabbage somewhere in the mix!
Buy Quality, not Quantity: Sounds absurd, but not so. There’s no point in buying a kilo of “cheap” value meat for 40% of it to disappear in water and fat when it is cooked, as Jay Rayner on the Channel 4 Food Fight recently showed. Since we started buying better welfare meat, we find the wastage much less, the meat more dense (it goes further) and it doesn’t end up shrunken, sitting in a puddle of water while it’s cooking. A free range chicken costs around £4/kg. If you can stretch it to 3 or 4 dinners you’re talking £1-2 per night. A quite large 2kg bird would cost around 50 pence per person, per meal, on this basis.
Cook what you can eat: I’m a favourite at going to the local butchers and asking for a “handful” of mince or buying 1 carrot from the greengrocer. This way, we use what we can, firstly afford, and we only cook what we can eat. Buying this way also means the little we do buy is fresh. It’s easy to get into the trap of buying huge value packs only to throw half of it away. Use your freezer if you find you’re not using something straight away.
This all sounds obvious, but the statistics above hint that up to now we have found it all too easy to waste food, in previous times of cheap and plentiful supply. Now most of us may need to tighten our budgets, and, along with a growing respect that we now have for our environment, I hope these hints will help.
J.R.