The MSE Food Waste Challenge Thread

Living_proof

I have one from the allotment to use but it's quite small and a pest to clean and peel. Does anyone know if you can nuke them like swede, sweet potato etc. in the microwave? I will just be mixing with mashed spud for celeriac mash.

LameWolf

If anyone's still in doubt about JackieO's parsnip & apple soup, I can personally vouch for it - I snagged her recipe when she posted it a while back, and it really is good!

Florence_J

Lots of sorry looking veg at the bottom of the fridge today. The old Flo would have thrown it away just because it looked a little worse for wear/bendy.

Not today! Made parsnip, carrot and celery rosti's which also helped used up the eggs languishing in the fridge.

Went lovely with our sunday meal and even helped cover the fact I had forgotten to buy potatoes.

prosaver

Slowly57 wrote: »

I had a Saturday night custard disaster (wanted to make half of an 'as directed' portion - but forgot to half the cooking instructions - so ended up with an abominable yellow custard blob). Main cost in milk - I'm thinking about 70p.

Do folks here not have an entire posse of wheely bins? We have a raft of bins that recycle our waste - so:
paper+card bin
plastics + tins bin
glass/garden + kitchen/food waste bin
and finally the evil 'bin' bin (which is half the size of the recycling bins and the contents of which goes to landfill)

Our bin bin is usually full of packaging that can't be recycled - even though I avoid it whenever possible.

paper+card bin
plastics + tins bin
glass/garden + kitchen/food waste bin (must be grass)
and finally the evil 'bin' bin

so how many lorry come to empty all those bins?
we have 3 lorry's
garden bin
paper, separate compartment- glass cardboard tins bin
general waste bin.

[Deleted User]

Just came home from Dds with left over veg and meat from dinner tonight more than enough for 2-3 meals for me.Dd has five to feed at the moment indoors so if there is not enough for them all I get it I don't mind as last week I have a roast on Monday night, and the rest of the meat minced up made two cottge pies with a tin of beans added, half to each portion and some cheesy mashed topped potato.Dd knows I would be so cross if food was thrown away and as there is only me to feed I am quite happy to do the same with this weeks left overs:)

I made a couple of litres of leek and potato soup for lunches this week yesterday, I had a good root around the freezer and found a bag of leeks that I had bought, peeled and chopped a few months ago, frozen, and forgotten about them. So lunches are more or less sorted for until about Thursday. Lots of NSDs for me this week :):)

Glad you enjoyed the parsnip and apple soup Lame Wolf :):) it is lovely isn't it

Cheers chums
JackieO xx

PasturesNew

I'm emptying my freezer, some stuff's been in there 4+ months and I live in hope that if I empty it then I'll find interesting food to put in there instead of the dull/boring stuff it's filled with right now.

I too found some chopped/frozen leeks in there. Not really a fan of them I decided to bury them with some of the 1Kg of Sainsbobs basics chopped/mixed veg as a veg soup. That used up half of each, but then I decided to finally get round to using my stick blender.

What a huge mistake. Blender has now been relegated to "pile of gadgets to never ever use again" and put upstairs.

First time I'd used one; bought it about 10 years ago... never got round to it. Ended up having the clean the walls

Then I've washed/cleaned it 10x and am still not happy that it's not looking pristine. One use and it's stained from the tomato juice ... not much, but it's annoyed me. PLUS you can nearly take your fingers off trying to poke around in the blade area.

So I'll continue to put up with lumpy soups - and continue to use forks to mash it down a bit ... and I'll pick up a potato masher when I spot one the right size/shape for about £1.

moneyistooshorttomention

I dont rate stick blenders either - having bought one many years back and had a similar experience (ie wall-splattering).

But I do rate having an ordinary blender. I treated myself recently to the blender (ie a Vitamix). I'd been reading about it for years and that it will blitz anything (as it's so heavy duty) but it's pricey and wasn't available in Britain anyway. When I did spot it here at last - I forked out (errrm....rather a lot...ahem...) and it will blitz anything in about two seconds flat (just as well - as it is very noisy!).

Though it is so costly - I thought it was worth it in order to be able tackle jobs that even ordinary blenders won't do and I can make quite a range of stuff home-made now (rather than buying it). For instance - I can make my own flour. It's not worth to make one's own standard flour (ie wholemeal flour from wheat berries in my case) as wheat berries cost so much here. But I do use it to make more "specialist" flours - eg my own rice flour for instance. Living so rurally now - I couldnt even find some of the flours I use - so it helps. Chickpea flour - I can find - but making it myself costs a lot less.

Primrose

That's strange. I use a stick blender on a fairly regular basis for making soup to store in one pint milk bottles in the freezer and I rarely have any problems now with splashing everywhere. The secret seems to be using the deepest saucepan you can and keeping the blender base slightly tilted on the base of the saucepan rather than moving it about too much.

PasturesNew

Primrose wrote: »

That's strange. I use a stick blender on a fairly regular basis for making soup to store in one pint milk bottles in the freezer and I rarely have any problems now with splashing everywhere. The secret seems to be using the deepest saucepan you can and keeping the blender base slightly tilted on the base of the saucepan rather than moving it about too much.

Well, as I'd used it for the first time, I was watching how it went into the soup and how fast it was working Wouldn't do that a 2nd time, of course.

But, there's also the issue of pot/volume. I had about 1.5 litres of soup in a 3.5 litre slow cooker.... so not a great deal of volume.

I had a 1Kg bag of frozen veg to use up, plus two frozen/chopped leeks, the pot contained half of that lot + some stock/tomato juice and some tomatoes that needed using up.

I generally don't deal in large volumes. Half a 3.5 litre slow cooker of food is about as big as it'd ever get... then, not often, as that made about 5 meals that needed eating or freezing. One minute I was feeling smug I'd "emptied the freezer of a lot of big items cluttering it up" - and a few hours later I was staring at soup that would find its way back into the empty space in the freezer.

Food doesn't get eaten in my house, it seems to just change form!

Primrose

PasturesNew wrote: »

One minute I was feeling smug I'd "emptied the freezer of a lot of big items cluttering it up" - and a few hours later I was staring at soup that would find its way back into the empty space in the freezer.

Food doesn't get eaten in my house, it seems to just change form!

That made me smile. Same problem here with certain foods like raw mince which get taken out of freezer, batch cooked into spag bol, chine con carne, cottage pie and then returned to freezer in a different guise, probably taking up more space than the original product. I find one has to be fairly ruthless about keeping a freezer inventory and menu planning to keep all this under control. And then you have days where for some reason your schedule involves a change in routine and eating needs and the whole lot goes to pot!