Waste not, want not

The whole 'don't waste food and use up the leftovers' thing seems to be snowballing even more just lately!

Since my last post on the topic I've seen a snippet in one of the free London newspapers about leftover recipes, an article on BBC Breakfast News about food waste and landfill sites and, just this afternoon, an article in the Tesco magazine.

It seems that the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) has recently launched an awareness campaign entitled Love Food Hate Waste (which has a fantastic website full of tips, recipes and statistics).

I've been posting to this site like a crazy with my tips and comments - let me know if you spot any of mine on the homepage!

In the meantime, here's my own personal five top tips to eliminate food waste:

1. Make a shopping list when you visit the supermarket and stick to it
   
2. Don't buy larger packs or special deals just because they are cheaper unless you're sure you will use them
   
3. Have loads of sandwich bags, foil, plastic pegs, airtight containers and cling film handy for storing things
   
4. Make sure you keep vegetables and salad in the crisper drawer thingie so that they don't wilt too soon
   
5. Always consider the possibilities for making the next day's lunch out of dinner leftovers (I might even post a few recipes for this sort of thing in the near future, because I'm awfully nice!)
   

It's amazing how much we all throw away and how much money we probably spend, not only on wasted food but also on buying new stuff to eat when there's perfectly good ingredients in the cupboards or fridge. So please let me know your own tips and recipes so that we can all be smug, thrifty, resourceful types now and again!

All patriotic and whatnot

I've got a real fancy for coronation chicken (or coronation turkey, in yesterday's case!) at the moment. It may just be the perfect sandwich filling for me and I can't help but think it would go down awfully well with some rice, too.

I'm not entirely sure how to make it myself, though, so I'm just off to investigate some recipes. If anybody has a tried and tested recipe for it, please let me know!

Nothing left over

Clayton-style bubble and squeak

It seems suddenly fashionable again to make the most of food leftovers and to shop and cook 'for the week'. This is probably part due to the fear of a recession, partly a concern about being green and sustainable, part reaction to the over-elaborate style of buying and cooking we've seen in the past few years and largely nostalgia!

I thought I'd throw my bit in since I love making the most of leftovers and spare odds and ends of food. The daddy of all leftover cooking, for me, is bubble and squeak. But not the proper nonsense (a sort of mashed-up and fried cake of potato and cabbage) - that's nice enough, but not a patch on the version my mum used to make!

So here's my mum's and now my own version:

Cut up loads of leftover roast potatoes, parsnips, Yorkshire puddings, sprouts (or cabbage, or whatever other similar vegetable) and even sage and onion stuffing if you have some left after roast chicken or turkey. Bung it all into a massive frying pan with a little bit of olive oil and fry it. That's all. It's just loads of nice things that are too good to throw away and taste fantastic re-fried!

I normally eat it with cold meats, baked beans and pickles. It's also good with eggs cooked however you like. It's the most comforting meal in the world and makes every day feel like Boxing day! If you can arrange to watch Herbie Rides Again, Moonraker or The Great Escape at the same time you'll be sound as a pound!

Joyous photo-sharing!

If you're feeling bored or blue
Or find yourself with nowt to do
Visit Chortleberry.com - the new photo-sharing community website.


Yeah ... I never was much of a poet.

But anyway, Chortleberry is a thriving new site where you can post your own photos to share them with others, view the work of many other budding amateur photograhers and generally have a bit of a chat. It's all lovely and free, too.

This has nothing to do with food - unless you count the photos of eggs.

Always do the hungry shop

The past few Saturdays seem to have taken a similar pattern: I wake up and realise there's nothing particularly exciting or appetising in the house for lunch. The sensible course of action would be to pop to Tesco for the weekly 'big shop' on Saturday morning and return in time for lunch with plenty of exciting options.

I'm not all that sensible, though. What we tend to do instead is try to postpone supermarket shopping for as long as possible in the following manner:

1. I suggest going out for lunch
2. We mull over this idea and discuss where, out of our collection of regular haunts, we should go
3. We get ready and drive to one of the lunch locations
4. While we're eating a plan for the afternoon formulates, which usually includes stopping off at Waitrose/M &S/local deli for wine and food for Saturday night
5. The shopping still hasn't been done by Sunday morning, but we've indulged ourselves gastronomically for at least half of the weekend, often at considerable expense.

Now, I have nothing against this and it means we get out and about on a Saturday, while exploring, supporting and enjoying our local eating places. We're now familiar with a fair few gastropubs, cafes, restaurants and delicatessens in the Uttlesford area, which is great.

However, there's a possible deviation from this plan and it should be resisted at all costs. Sometimes, when there's not much else to do on a Saturday afternoon, we give in and do the supermarket shopping just after lunch! This is A Bad Thing* and I'm here to warn you against it - and you never thought we'd get to the point of this post, did you?!

Last Saturday we ate a two-course meal at the Cricketers' Arms in Rickling Green (a reasonably well-known local gastropub). The food there isn't bad but, on this occasion, all four of the dishes we ate seemed to be over salty and incredibly oily! This isn't intended to be a review of the pub, though: I'm merely using this example as illustration.

So, fairly full from our large lunch of oil and salt we drove to Tesco to buy everything we'd need for the following week. But, of course, when you're full (and, in this case, bilious) you don't really fancy any more food and I found myself drifting aimlessly down the aisles unable to look a decent fillet steak in the, er, face! I just couldn't bring myself to imagine what I'd want to eat during the week, let alone that evening, and found that my powers of 'food matching' were severely under par. "Do green beans go with these noodles? Oh, I can't think about eating noodles at a time like this!"

I felt as if I never wanted to eat again (yes, me!) and the result was a whole week with no sensible food in the house. I'd hardly bought any 'proper' dinners and there was nothing to eat as a snack, so my stomach was rumbling almost every evening. I'd also failed to get anything for my lunches so I ended up spending over the odds by buying my lunch in London most days.

My advice to you, therefore, is this: always shop when you're hungry! It's the only way!

* Anyone who knows me particularly well will be surprised, nay shocked, by my use of Dickensian, teacher-style capitalisation. That's how bad a thing it is! You see what it's driven me to?!