I have been on a zero food waste challenge for about three months now, and while November and January have been going great, December was more complicated. BF came from Guatemala City with a big shop that he had done a week before so there were lots of apple and grapes (typical to eat around Christmas) that were a bit old already, and having lots of guests, some of them unannounced made meal planning complicated.
Having the hens and the turkey around is great as they love to eat vegetable peels and bones, not technically a waste if unused but it is still a win that allows to save a bit on the corn and bird mix we give them. We are fencing the garden so they can’t go to the neighbor’s land anymore to eat worms and whatever is there.
Following those simple tips, you can reuse and repurpose your leftover, avoid boredom of eating the same and save on groceries.
Old stuff
Bread: You can make delicious pudding from old bread, soaking it in milk, eggs and sugar, then baking it with grapes or apples. French toast also tastes great with dry bread.
Bananas: I freeze my old bananas (peeled, you can’t peel a frozen banana, I did that mistake so you don’t have to). I can throw them in the blender for a morning smoothie or when I have a few I make banana bread.
Citrus: I got a LOT of limes and grapefruits from the ranch. I peeled the grapefruits into small bags and froze them for smoothies and to sprinkle on fruit salads. The lemons and lime I squeezed and froze in ice cubes for a minute ready lemonade.
Apples: Properly stored, they last for months. If they are about to go bad you can blend them and cook them with sugar and cinnamon, then can, or bake an apple crumble.
Tomatoes: I blend the very ripe ones with garlic, one onion and froze those bags of ready made tomato sauce for pasta and stews.
Meat: Before you can freeze meat that is about to go bad, you need to cook it. Shred the meat into a stir fry or dice into a stew, then you can freeze it and keep for months.
Perfect recipes to throw old food
Stews. You can make stews with just about any vegetable that tolerates lengthy cooking. Squash, carrots, potatoes, onions, etc. If you don’t have enough vegetables to make a stew, freeze them in small pieces then throw in the stew.
Soup. Same as the stew. Any vegetable, a blender, and you are done.
Stir fry. Ideal to recycle old rice and old vegetables. And old chicken, or beef. And herbs (mint, coriander, parsley on top when cooked). And virtually anything, chopped thinly.
Recycling leftovers
Eating leftovers for days can be boring. Instead, learn how to creatively reuse the meat, the side or both into a new dish.
Roasted chicken can become chicken soup, chicken enchiladas, chicken salad, fried chicken, and a chicken sandwich to brown bag to the office.
Steak can become tacos, beef noodle, beef stir fry, beef pad thai, and be sliced on top of a salad.
A side of vegetables can be completed with rice or lentils or beans and a bit of ground beef in a stir fry.
Lasaña can be frozen for a lazy day, so can stews (I like to leave the potatoes out, they get watery when they thaw), soups, and casseroles. Label your food properly, and divide it in one meal portions before you freeze it.
How do you repurpose leftovers to avoid getting bored?
This post was featured on the Canadian Budget Binder, Frugal Habits, Modest Money, thank you!
We make soup ALL the time with our leftovers! Our trusty VitaMix is used at the end of every week to make a new recipe! 🙂 Love the idea for old bread!
yeah pudding is really good! you have to keep a bag to throw the old bread and when you have enough you make it.
I’ve gotten a lot better at reducing my food waste. As I’ve gotten better at cooking, I’ve learned what will keep for a week or two and how to pick a series of recipes that will let me use most of what I buy in a week.
But cooking for one is still hard. Most fresh vegetables are a rip off and come in far greater quantities than I can reasonably use in a week.
The worst thing is when I get surprise evening meetings and I don’t have time to cook, then food waste is almost guaranteed.
cooking for one is challenging. Even alone, I cook for 3-4, eat twice the same and freeze one portion. Too much preparation for just one meal!
Yea it’s much more time and energy efficient to cook in batches and freeze the rest.
I have found that pretty much any leftover meat and veg can be chucked into a pan, combined with rice for a rissoto type of dish. I enjoy the random combinations of whatever is hanging around in my fridge, so it’s actually quite hard to get bored cooking this way, compared to planning out your meals. We always used to just cook the same old when proper meal planning, now half the time we just make stuff with whatever we have and it’s more fun the new way.
I’ve gotten better at using the freezer to reduce food waste. If we’re getting tired of leftovers and there’s still a decent chunk left, I can usually pack it in individual containers and freeze it for lunches at a later date.
BTW – frozen bananas have become a staple. Breakfast = frozen banana smoothie
same here!
These are some great tips! My biggest issue is dealing with food when it’s become too spoiled to cook (or has expired). I can see how having hens would help with this challenge. I think I’d fail this challenge :/
I keep my food alive, they never expire 🙂
Great tips! I am doing pretty good on food waste since I got a juicer. Any extra uncooked fruit or vegetables get juiced now instead of thrown away. I also try to plan meals around leftovers. I am doing pretty good this year!
You’re doing great! I just got a juicer too, super excited!
I normally end up with a lot of fritters whenever we have left over meats or pizzas as pretty much anything can go on top of a pizza.
Anything with melted cheese on top tastes so much better.
Great tips Pauline! We’re doing much better with food waste now that we’ve cut down our number of trips to the store each month. We like to repurpose by making soups or salads. We have a nice deep freeze, so we like to freeze as much as we can. We’re also going to try and build a compost this year so we can also use that for our gardening.
Less supermarket trips is definitely a saver. I am getting started with compost too, but apparently the worms don’t do so well in the sun..
Very crafty indeed. Some really great tips here that I am forwarding to my chief and chef my loving wife. Thanks for the creativity.
Glad you enjoyed the tips Steven.
When I read Kitchen Confidential (great book) by Anthony Bordain he said to avoid Sunday Brunch for this very reason: restaurants are repurposing all of their old food. You don’t know what’s in that fruit salad!
Salmonella, maybe?
I think many people fail to realize that really great French toast needs good bread that is stale. My wife doesn’t really care for French toast, but I could eat that stuff all the time.
Recently we made some chili using some left over chicken my wife had from a work taco bar. We just kind of guessed at what we would need. It turned out great!
I recently made French toast from fresh sliced bread and it was not a success.
Chicken is incredibly versatile, chili chicken sounds delicious!
Veggies I don’t think i’ll use right away I cut and freeze almost immediately and use later for story fry’s or stews..same with seasonal berries. Fruit I don’t eat will almost always end up getting baked somehow.
I just started doing the veggies freezing, it works really great if labelled properly and if you remember them.
Those are great tips! I have two problems. One is I’m a shitty cook…and kind of hate doing it for the most part. And two, I’m very weird about old food…like I have a phobia of food poisoning and if things even look weird than I get skittish! lol! That being said, I’m trying to buy less at a time so I try not to waste food as much. It may not be as budget friendly, but at least I feel less guilty.
Cooking for one without getting bored is complicated. Buying small quantities is a start, especially since you can easily walk to the market or shop. I try to get rid of the good stuff first, if I buy fancy mushrooms or a good cut of meat, I make it a priority and feel less guilty throwing an old onion. When I lived alone I had lots of friends over to eat, and they would invite me back or invite me for a drink after dinner, social and win win
Wow, great tips Pauline! We do something similar with bananas that are going bad however we make ice cream out of it! It’s actually really good!!
We do a pretty good job of menu planning and we rarely waste food or have too many leftovers of something. If we happen to have leftovers then we use it for lunch throughout the week. I love the idea of using peels for the chickens…that’s not practical for me but it’s a great way to not waste.
I’d like to see the banana ice cream recipe. I make instant frozen yogurt with frozen fruits and yogurts that I froze but have to eat on the spot or it gets really hard to eat. I never get the texture right for ice cream to keep it in a tub.
That’s a good tip about freezing bananas. I’m not a fan of banana bread but my husband and daughter love it. That’s a good idea!
Apple and banana crumble is pretty good with ripe bananas too.
I would like to say I have gotten better at not wasting food. We make soup ALL the time. That is a good tip about bananas, I always throw them out if I am not making banana bread or ice cream, after they get over-ripe. I make smoothies a lot as well, so it will come in handy,
Good job! To make a banana smoothie from frozen I cut them in 10 pieces at least, or the blender has trouble processing half a banana.
I make a lot of inventive sandwiches. If it was a main course yesterday, it will probably be a sandwich tomorrow!
I”m almost joyful when bananas get over-ripe, because it gives me a perfect excuse to make banana bread.
Oh sure sandwiches deserve a whole paragraph! Since moving here, the bread experience hasn’t been as great but it is a great was to re purpose anything with sauce or old veggies.
Great tips. We waste so much food. You can also use stale bread to make bread crumbs. Pulse them in your food processor and store them in your freezer. Easy and you can save a few bucks on store bought bread crumbs. Juicing also helps use up fruits and veggies. And you’re right – you can never go wrong with making soup!
good tip on bread crumbs, I don’t use them often, and sometimes wish I had some but the rest of the pack would go bad. Having them handy on the freezer is perfect.
My best trick is to prep everything as soon as I get home from the store — there’s SO MUCH LESS WASTE that way!
true, it makes it easy to snack on carrot sticks and celery when everything is washed and ready. In our case it doesn’t work though because we shop once every 10-15 days and veggies have a slightly longer life if they stay as is (or we prepare and freeze).
Excellent post Pauline! I too have bananas wrapped in plastic wrap and in the freezer, but I noticed that they are starting to turn a bit black anyways. I like using them to make banana muffins. And when we made our own bread I would take the end pieces and freeze them for breadcrumbs as Shannon mentioned.
Thank you Sicorra! I have to look into banana muffins, it sounds delicious! My bananas stay white but I use them at most 2 weeks later, maybe with time they get black.
Soups and stews are a great catch all for leftovers. You can throw almost anything in it, including the bones/carcass for stock.
I admit that I used to be horrible with food waste, but we’ve changed our ways. I rarely throw anything out now except if we get lettuce that goes bad. Everything else I make smoothies or stir fry. I also keep bread in the refrigerator. It lasts forever. It certainly isn’t as fresh as brand new, but I like to toast my bread for sandwiches, so it works fine for that.
I imagine now that you have to report to Mr CBB you are doing even better!
I freeze bananas too (and grapes-I love eating frozen grapes right out of the bag). I typically make a bunch of plain chicken on Sunday. Then the rest of the week we eat leftovers by adding different sauces. One night we have buffalo chicken, one night bbq, sometimes we shred the chicken and make chicken salad with mayo and cranberries.
my BF loves frozen grapes too, it just makes my teeth grind, like chewing ice cubes!
Great Post Pauline!
We don’t waste anything in our house if we can help it. One thing I learned back in Oct 2012 when I participated in the Welfare Food Challenge was that I can make a nice vegetable stock with all the peelings from my vegetables. Now we keep a ziploc bag in the freezer and fill it with trimmings and once a week boil them up, strain and make a lovely broth. Onion peels give a lovely flavour and the broth turns a golden colour. Great tips!
There was a show on TV I don’t remember if Gordon Ramsey or that guy who lives the simple life in a homestead and they were frying the potato, carrot and other vegetable peels, just slightly coated in flour, like vegetable tempura. It looked really good, still have to try that. So you compost the peels once they were used for stock?
Great tips, especially the one about tomatoes. Those seem to be the thing that goes bad the most here. One thing we do with leftovers is have a “leftover dinner night” once a week or so. I just pull the last 3 days or so of leftovers out of the fridge, heat them up, and we have a buffet of sorts. The kids get a few things to choose from, and I don’t have to (technically) cook dinner. 🙂
Yes as soon as I’m done they go in the compost heap. I also use leftover coffee grinds in water to put into my plants….
I started doing that too, anything to help the poor little flowers grow in the jungle!
I’m big on leftovers, sometimes they even taste better after a day of marinating in the fridge. For the foods that are leftover after the leftover feast there’s two possible destinations for them. The first is the chickens. we keep chickens for eggs. They will eat almost anything you give them! After that would be the compost pile. Being in a wooded lot, we have a huge amount of leaves we can shred and compost, adding organic matter to the pile helps a lot!
I give most of it to the chicken as well, then the chicken poop can be used for compost.
I forgot about the chicken poop! That goes into the compost pile. I guess you could say that the leftovers were used “twice” to good effect 🙂
I cook in smaller portions so that my leftovers stay under control. Then I will usually just eat leftovers the next day or take them in my lunch. I also like to cook a lot of meats in the crockpot and then use leftovers for sandwiches the next day. Crockpot is king for me.
I am a big fan of crockpot cooking too, although I always make at least 6 meals out of it! need to reduce portions, it is not as good when unfrozen.
Too late – I froze an unpeeled banana – takes a LOT of time to get it peeled but I manage it!
Also, I nominated you for a lovely blogger award (and linked to your blog, so hopefully some new people might learn about you). Don’t feel obliged to participate, it’s a bit detailed, but just wanted to let you know.
haha! I just let it thaw, peeled and used the mushy thawed thing in a smoothie.
Thanks for the mention, I am not big on those chain things, but will mention it in my Friday recap.
for some poor people food is very valuable so don’t waste the food if u have party at home and if lots of food is remaing then give to poor people
In France people often took food to the church but now they have made crazy rules about hygiene and knowing where the food comes from. Even supermarkets instead of giving food that is about to get old (not past the date) have to throw it and can’t give it to charities.