Saving on you food bill

We waste huge amounts of food.

“In the United States, for instance, as much as 30 percent of food, worth some US$48.3 billion, is thrown away.”
Most of this waste is easily and entirely avoidable,
“£9bn of avoidable food waste was disposed of in England and Wales each year. It is mostly food that could have been consumed if it had been better stored or managed, or had not been left uneaten on a plate.”

The 12-step program for reforming the wastaholic (no finding god here)

1 - Admit there is a problem with reckless wasting
“On average, households waste 14 percent of their food purchases. Fifteen percent of that includes products still within their expiration date but never opened. Jones estimates an average family of four currently tosses out $590 per year, just in meat, fruits, vegetables and grain products.”

2- Increase your consciousness of the food waste you produce. For me this involved saving my food scraps for compost. Removing the out of sight out and mind mentality brought about by conventional disposal methods, down the sink or out in the trash.

3 – Commit to the extra effort and discipline required.

4 – Organization of your fridge. A good chef keeps an obsessively organized fridge and is pedantic about rotating stock, because one of their main responsibilities is to minimize waste.

5 – Keep a strong awareness of your inventory, this enables you to avoid duplicate purchases and use produce before it spoils.

6 – Plan menus around the ingredients that need using, yesterdays leftovers become the basis of today’s meal along with the carrots that are starting to go limp. The internet is a great resource for ideas of what to do with the sad looking celery.

7 - Control portions, cooking and serving smaller portions reduces the potentials for leftovers and waste. We generally over eat and won’t become malnourished if we don’t cook quite enough once in a while.

8- Buy less more frequently. You will be eating fresher food and shopping more precisely when you purchase for only a few meals at a time.

9 – Get inventive. Some of my most well received meals was created from leftover this and that. See bottom of the fridge salad…….

10 – Use your freezer wisely. Certain meals and foods freeze well. Most ripe fruit, certain vegetable for certain uses, a juicer is great too.

11- Habit, create your own shopping and cooking techniques that make it is easy to recycle, reduce and reuse food waste.

12 –Fun, enjoy the time you spend saving yourself money and helping reduce the worlds wasteful ways

If we all stop wasting food that could have been eaten, the CO2 impact would be the equivalent of taking 1 in 5 cars off the road.

Bottom of the fridge salad

This was a fusion of left over flavours, Middle Eastern met Mexican and Asian. As usual the plan changed many times, they were going out for dinner then not, so I grabbed things and ended up with.
Marinated eggplant – roast cubes with a little oil, s and p, toast spices cumin, coriander, fennel, anise, clove, etc and grind. Coat cooked eggplant and cover with plenty of oil, some lemon juice, garlic ginger etc anything you like…….
Pico de gallo – a simple salsa of chopped tomatoes, jalapenos, onion, lime, cilantro…..
Chicken –chicken poached in sake and mirin with lemongrass
Rice -

A little chopping and combining, some reheating and one problem they wanted me to make more.