The MSE Food Waste Challenge Thread

Islandmaid

JackieO - thanks for the tip re dipping rissoles in dry stuffing, I have Half a box to use up. I have some Lamb left over, but not enough for curry or shep pie, so rissoles will be on my meal plan next week, and the bone will make soup for next weeks work lunches

[Deleted User]

The dried stuffing mix I always use instead of basic bread crumbs and find it just give whatever I am using a bit more flavour.
After the over stocking at Supermarkets at Christmas you can often get different flavours stuffing mixes for virtually pennies in January, and I always stock up for the year. Sage and onions dried stuffing mix used on some pork fillet dipped in flour and egg and then the mix and roasted in the remoska or oven pads out pork fillet beautifully as it sometimes can be expensive so you actually need less meat.I bought some wild red onion and basil last year at Lidls for 10p a box and its been gorgeous.I have used it throughout the year. I snaffled 6 boxes and I was really pleased with my bargain.

Last night I came home with a large plate of left over veg from DDs, and there is enough for me to have a roast beef and veg dinner tonight (I just have to make some gravy up) and the surplus left over beef I will use with a salad for lunch tomorrow .DD also gave me some yogurts form a multipacks she had bought four lemon curd ones and three rhubarb and vanilla ones as she's not keen on those flavours so not yogurts to buy this week.I have about two desert spoons of plain yogurt left in the large pot in the freezer and I will chop up an apple small and add a spoonful of honey to it and mix it up with the remainder of the yogurt in the pot and that will be pudding tonight Only thing throw in the recycling bin will be the washed out container .

My recycling bin bag gets emptied once a fortnight and is mostly paper and glass.I have a very small plastic sandwich bag hanging on a door in the kitchen for peelings and eggs shells etc, that's about all that gets chucked in my house any tins or glass goes into the recycling bin across the road in the precinct.

Left over leg of lamb bone makes delicious soup stock in the slow cooker with lots of bottom of the fridge veg that's past their best :):)
I also save and freeze chicken carcass's until I have enough to make chicken stock for soup as well.

Primrose

Jackie0. I love reading about your frugal habits because manynof them echo my own - you can tell we were war babies ! And i love the hint for using stuffing as coating for rissoles. We often put a dessert spoonful of it in our gravy mix to heighten the taste of an otherwise low flavour meat meal.
Yesterday we roasted a large breast of lamb complete with bones on a bed of rosemary and garlic . It cost £2 and the meat was some of the most tender we have eaten foe years. Our butcher complains nobody will buy it.

Like yours my fridge is filled with little cling film covered pots of leftovers which get used up in all kiinds of ways. The other day we accidentally bought the wrong kind of muesli which we don't much like. This morning my husband used some of it in a sweet breakfast omelette which also had a small amount of yeaterday's leftover dessert of (freebie from neighbour apples & pear) compote withsultana and cinnamon mixed in. It was very tasty. It's surprising how succeasful some "off the wall" cooking experiments can be. Too many years of watching Ready Steady Cook perhaps,but I thiught that was a great programme for encouraging cookery innovation with sometimes weird mixtures of ingredients.

Meanwhile I'm just contemplating my remaining home grown tomatoes which are now looking slightly wriinkled but will not be wasted and will form the basis of a minestrone soup sometime this week. Thank heavens for our stick blender which if necessary will whizz everything up and allow two soup portions to be stored in a one pont milk bottle in the freezer.

Oh, and some lemon rind from a lemon mixed in with sage and onion stuffing will elevate the aroma and flavour to a new height !

Florence_J

Found a very bruised and soft apple at the bottom of the food bowl today so put it in the food bin. I did consider chopping it up and cooking it but there was more bad bits than good bits so it didn't seem worth it. Still I feel a bit bad now.

Primrose

Florence_J wrote: »

Found a very bruised and soft apple at the bottom of the food bowl today so put it in the food bin. I did consider chopping it up and cooking it but there was more bad bits than good bits so it didn't seem worth it. Still I feel a bit bad now.

I'mm sure your local birds would have been very grateful for it had you chopped it up finely and thrown it out.

[Deleted User]

Primrose I snaffled a bag of 'soft' tomatoes Y/S down to 30p a few weeks ago from Asdas and there was around 2-3 lbs in the bag (I am far to old to work that out in Kilo's;)) These I put into boiling water to remove the skins, I then fried off an small onion diced up small in the saucepan, added the flesh of the tomato's ,some dried herbs, a slurp of white wine (optional, but I had about a glass full in a bottle in the fridge,) and a dollop of garlic puree, simmered very slowly until reduced down to a thick sauce,Decanted into a couple of soft freezer bags, and when cold froze.This made a fab sauce which I used as a base for a couple if meals . So much nicer than anything from a jar and at a fraction of the price . My sauce I costed out at around 60p and there was probably about three jars of the stuff

I enjoy trying to reproduce the stuff in the shops for half the price . As you say a few odds and ends make such a difference in flavour and really don't cost the earth to buy.

Primrose

JackieO - doesn't it feel good when you achieve a victory like that against the system? I must confess, I leave the skins on tomatoes these days when pureeing them down. A stick blender completely dissolves them. I grow a collection of herbs in the garden and the addition of a selective few can often completely "lift" the flavour of a very inexpensive meal.

ScotinLondon

Afternoon all. I have a quick question, i have a few apples that are on their way out. I am going to try and consume as much as I can, however, for the ones i cannot - apart from chopping it up, as Primrose has suggested above - could I bake it in the oven, low heat and long time and then feed it to the birds?

Am lucky that no ninja squirrels, as new neighbours cats have scared them of.

Thanks
SIL

Primrose

ScotinLondon wrote: »

Afternoon all. I have a quick question, i have a few apples that are on their way out. I am going to try and consume as much as I can, however, for the ones i cannot - apart from chopping it up, as Primrose has suggested above - could I bake it in the oven, low heat and long time and then feed it to the birds..
SIL

If the apples are eating apples, this will probaby work as they will tend to stay whole althiugh I'm not sure whether the birds will discriminate between raw and cooked. If they're bramley cooking apples they will disintegrate and probably turn to purree.

If you want a recipe where it doesn,t matter what they do, try stir-frying finely sliced onions, very thinly slicced red cabbage and some sliced apples, with chopped frankfurter added at the end. Serve with mashed potatoes. Bramley apples will dissolve and add some juice to the mixture (otherwise add a little stock to prevent it becomng too dry). Eating apples will stay firmer.

Otherwise you could try drying them very slowly in a very low oven until all the moisture has been removed and then used as dried fruit with cereals. However. u less you have a large enough quantity of apples to make this worthwhile, the fuel cost will outweigh the cost of the apples!

[Deleted User]

any past their best apples I have are usually peeled sliced and chucked with a few diced parsnip in a pan with a couple of stock cubes to make soup, I know its supposed to be cooking apples, but an apple is an apple in soups and parsnips with apple is a lovely soup to have on a cold winters day with a few cruetons (cubed stale bread dried out on the bottom of the oven when cooking something else )