Some useful hints on reducing Food Waste
This is a subject that has always been very close to my heart. Having grown up in East Africa, I learned pretty early on that there is no such thing as true food waste. Few things can't be used twice, reducing your cost of living, waste disposal and basically making the most of every morsel of food you have paid for.
Food Waste Soup, sounds delicious doesn't it and yet, this is one of the single most economical ways of utilising all the vegetable peelings that (hopefully) otherwise will make straight for the compost heap. It doesn't require intelligence or require you to purchase anything, if you do as we have done for years now.
Everytime you cook some vegetables, put all the peelings into a tub and freeze it. You can even keep some of the liquid drained after cooking the veg and freeze that too. When time comes to make a delicious soup you won't have to go out to buy stock cubes, which incidentally contain more crap then would care to list here or anywhere else for that matter. Simply defrost a tub or two of the frozen peelings.
Defrost, not sticking into a microwave, surely, anybody can remember that they will need to eat tomorrow. Microwaves are the single best way to have your electricity bill go straight through the roof, so stick whatever needs defrosting into the fridge the night before and it'll be thawed the next day.
The mixture of veg peelings makes the greatest stock for a soup ever. You'll have everything in there you need. Just simmer for a while, drain or even pass the veg through a fine sieve and you are more or less ready to have a warming soup.
For next to nothing, I may add.
Where you take your stock from here is entirely up to you but the foundation is laid and ready to be experimented with.
How cool is that?
Meat Stock from roasting, frying or just about anything you do that involves meat.
Everytime you fry a steak, roast a beef, pork or lamb joint or a chicken, don't wash the pan with washing up liquid, pour some hot water into the dish and try to get as much of what is stuck to the dish off and freeze. You'll be amazed just how much flavour is contained in something that most people basically regard as a nuissance getting rid of.
This is something else that we have done for donkeys years now and we always have several pots in the freezer where we store the different flavour stocks.
What it does require is a suitable large freezer but those tend to be available to most people, even if it is only a seperate section in the fridge.
Again, always defrost overnight in the fridge, NEVER use the microwave for this (in fact, throw the thing at your nearest charity shop).
Don't buy like you are intending to feed a hundred people. This is something that literally drives me round the bend when I see people shopping for the weekend. I don't know about the USA but in the UK your average family will tend to buy at least several joints of meat, even if there are only 3 or 4 of them eating.
It gets worse when there is a Bank Holiday on the horizon and people are about to have visitors. People will happily buy three or four joints of meat and a chicken, just to show how much food they can lay on and then throw in the bin in the evening, which tends to be the way with a lot of Brits.
This is disgusting, honestly, don't people have any concept of the fact that it takes approx. 10 times as much vegatable matter to produce one part of animal? At Christmas our cats drag half eaten turkey into our backgarden and someone mentioned to me there is a recession. Must have bypassed those idiots. Pardon my French.
There is little if any meat that cannot be frozen for another day or make roast beef or turkey sandwiches till Easter for all I care. Foods is a precious resource and should not be disposed of lightly.
We constantly have leftover meals frozen in the freezer, ready to provide that easy, 'I can't be bothered to cook' dinner.
Food Waste, no thank you.
Oh, don't think you can or should for that matter eat a pound of steak in one go. It'll only go to waste. Half the size, organic now because you are saving on quantity and make up for it with a large salad. You may find that you are actually better off this way in more then one sense.
Learn to distrust food labelling. No, for a change I am not concerned with ingredients, that's an entirely different kettle of fish alltogether but rather the abundance of labels referring to 'Best before', 'Use By' and 'Sell by' dates on supermarket foods.
Most to this is plain crap.
Sell by dates are only for instore stockkeeping purposes and nothing else. They don't mean a thing for the consumer. You will be able to tell when your bread has gone off, it'll turn green, blue and read with mould. Just because there is a sell by date on the packet, that is no reason to throw it away on that day.
Use by dates are close to as bad, but not quite. Cheese or butter from the supermarkets counters are usually labelled with a 'Use by' date. This is yet another way to make the customer dispose of perfectly good and edible foods. Take cheese for example. I love Vintage Cheddar, often matured for up to 5 years and when the supermarket sells it to us, its use by date is reduced to a maximum of 5 days? Sorry, how can a 5 year old cheese go off within 5 days? Besides, with cheese is perfectly safe to just cut off any mould, which makes it different from most other foods that when they show signs of mould infestations should be gotten rid of. Cheese is too dense to allow the spores to penetrate the product.
There are some clear indications that food is about to spoil. In plastic packs, something you should avoid anyway, the first giveaway is the pack expanding, in this case it is a good idea to simply smell the product, unless you have a totally screwed olfactory sense, mould will be recognised by most people.
The extremely short lifetime of 'Use by' labelled foods are so that the food industry is on the safe side.
Best before dates are the worst of the lot I guess. The label means exactly what it say, the product will be at its best on or before that date. It has absolutely no bearing on its useability and it should never be disposed of, something that more and more people do on a daily basis.
Take prepacked bread for example. Allthough I bake +90% of our bread myself, occassionally I do buy a loaf and I couldn't care less about the best before date. It means it will be fresher before the date given, not that it'll die an untimely death. Like with everything else, bread will eventually go mouldy, so a simple look at the loaf will tell you if it's still edible. After all, you are not going to eat the label, are you?
Make more use of your freezer. Nothing in the world is as useful as a freezer. We have two, a fridge freezer and a huge chest freezer of almost industrial proportions that'll feeze down to as low as -40 centigrade, that is cold, believe me.
Even if you live on your own a small one will be ever so useful. Freeze bread by the number of slices you are likely to use every day. Simple, easy, cost effective and literally no waste ever. All you have to invest in are a some freezer bags, which can be reused over and over again. Always remember, plastic does NOT decompose EVER. It just breaks down into ever smaller sections of those endless molecular chains and one the smallest size is reached, they will start mimicking hormones and that has an impact on each and everyone of us.
I must be off to a meeting of the local residents now, so I will get back to this thread later, as it is pretty much an ongoing effort. (Unless I decide to write a book instead and start hawking it to the members here,
).