rose petal jam

The crusade continues...

I know I haven't blogged for a while, but my efforts to stop wasting food continue!

It's been really interesting. The amount of food that we throw out has decreased dramatically. hardly anything is wasted anymore which is great and our shopping bills are much lower too. I think I have been more creative and haven't felt hard done by as I thought that I might without being able to pop out and buy new ingredients on a whim.

Things I have learned are:

1. planning is essential. You need to look at a whole week of meals, or at least a few days, then plan them to make sure that ingredients are duplicated but not meals. I find because I am cooking for two in the main, often you can't buy small amounts of stuff for just one meal, especially in supermarkets so you need to find two meals which use some of the same things but which taste different.

2. Because of this you have to be MORE not less creative. believe me, using a whole savoy cabbage between two people before it goes off and without boring yourself silly is tricky! But I have managed to make it into; a pasta sauce, a soup, a baked dish, a coleslaw type salad.

3. Keep more things in the fridge. Fruits in particular last a lot longer in the fridge (not bananas though, they go weird and black!). Also, if you have soft herbs and you wash and dry them and put them in zip lock plastic bags and get as much air out as possible, they last for ages. Same goes for salad leaves and things like chard and spinach.

4. always always look in your cupboards before shopping. When I did my inventory at the beginning of the experiment I had 5 bags of self raising flour. Presumably because each time I shopped I thought I needed it and bought more. My inner bakers was obviously on overdrive!

5. Following on from that, keep cupboards relatively tidy. You can't tell if you have 5 bags of self raising flour if your dry goods cupboard looks like Armageddon!

6. If you have a random ingredient left over from another meal and don't know what to do with it, go to this website You can enter up to three ingredients you may have to use up and it will spit out recipes for you to try! But BEWARE that you don't pick one that needs you to buy loads of other ingredients - therein madness lies!

7. If you are more budget minded, you naturally lean towards seasonal stuff, which is better for the environment. The more creative you get with something as humble as say swede, the less inclined you feel to buy something more exciting looking that has been flown in from Kenya or somewhere even more far flung.

8. The bin doesn't get as full! For those who get rubbish collections fortnightly rather than weekly, this is a huge bonus as your bin isn't overflowing come bin day. Also, the kitchen bin needs taking out less often which I don't know anyone who enjoys it, so that can only be a good thing!

9. It helps you lose weight! I am much more portion aware now as don't want to have lots of left overs that I struggle to do something with. In doing so and cooking less you end up eating less as there are no 'second helpings' of anything!

10. Having a good store cupboard really helps. If you have lots of basics like different flours, dried whole and ground spices, dried herbs, lentils, pulses, noodles, stock, sauces and flavourings like worcester sauce, tabasco etc, you can make something out of anything! So by always having a good stock of essentials like garlic, olive oil, anchovies packed in oil etc etc you can make a meal from little bits of this and that and it's will always be delicious and well balanced.

So that has been my adventure in reducing waste. I am going to continue, it's not an experiment, it's now a new way of life/ cooking for me. There is still a bit of me that yearns for reckless and wanton purchasing of stuff but having a hard look at the money, time and frankly the world's resources that I was wasting has made me realise that it's no way to run your kitchen.

There is more than enough food in this world for everyone, but we in the west and increasingly in the far east are wasting vast quantities of food and it's just not right. As the world's population grows, food will be scarcer and we are already seeing the impact in predicted wheat and milk shortages.

If we really are throwing away 1/3 of what we buy in this country alone as recent reports in the media suggest, imaging how much food globally is going from field, to shop, to home, to bin without ever being consumed. It's a really sobering thought.

a forgotten treasure

I was going through my food photography archive and found this image, taken long before I started my food blog but in a time when I loved recording the food that I made, just to remember it. (Don't know if I have ever admitted this but I take hardly any of the photos on this blog, they are taken by Dom. He is the artist in the family).

This picture was taken on my birthday weekend, almost 3 years ago. Dom and I were staying in a lovely apartment, set in the eaves of the old coast guard station at Robin Hood's Bay. This was way before we had a cottage of our own. I have always been drawn to this part of the coast, so many childhood memories and I still feel incredibly lucky that we now own our own little piece of north yorkshire heaven there (albeit without a sea view!)

One of the reasons that I love places like RHB, Staithes and Whitby is the whole smugglers thing. Ever since I was small, and reading famous fives avidly, I have been fascinated by smugglers. The whole of this area was riddled with them apparently in the 18th & 19th centuries and the best RHB smuggling fact is that the cottages, which are all higgeldy piggeldy and crowded on top of each other, have secret passage ways and links between them, so much so that a roll of silk could make it's way from the bottom of the village, all the way up the hill, without seeing daylight. Yorkshire had the BEST smugglers. Official.

Oh and the curd? I seem to remember that I used a Nigella recipe, but substituted seville oranges for the usual lemons. It was gorgeous, fruity, rich and resonant, sharp, but sweet.

Perfect to have on toast, with a sea view and the sound of the gulls all around. Just look at that view...

Tricked!

After our trip to the oriental supermarket I had in mind to use up some of the things I bought for last night's dinner in a different way.

I decided to make a thai chicken noodle broth. I had some organic chicken drumsticks in the freezer which needed eating up and I thought poaching them and shredding them in soup would be great and also I could use up some more of the greens we bought to go with last night's dinner and a piece of ginger that was starting to look a little fatigued. My recent store cupboard clear out had revealed thai fish sauce and minced lemon grass in a squeezy tube so it was all there to be used.

I was so bewitched by the chillis we bought. They are so beautiful as you can see and I was marvelling at their perfection - each one seemed like a supermodel of a chilli, slim, perfectly shaped, glossy.

But these little red bullets were tricksy! Now, I always taste a little bit of any fresh chilli I buy to gauge the heat as it varies so much even if you are buying the same kind from the same supplier. Nervously, as these are small and thai, I placed a little bit on my tongue and waited for the tingle. It did tingle, but not vastly so I put four of the little monkeys into the wet and dry grinder, along with the fresh ginger and the garlic.

Later on as the chicken was simmering away in it's fragrant broth, I finely sliced more chillis, about four I think, along with the holy basil, coriander and the spring onions.

When the time came, I took the chopping board over to the pan and scrapped the chillis and the onions into the broth. A small sliver of red chilli remained behind so I popped it into my mouth. Oh my.

The chilli was a real scorcher. Now, I am quite accustomed to chilli, you can't live with dear Dom for 10 years and not be - he's a really chilli addict and they, and various chilli sauces find their way into many dishes in this house. Including things where they really SHOULDN'T be but don't get me started on that. But this one was... well, shall we say beyond uncomfortable? And I had put about eight of them into my soup! The milder one I tasted initially was laughing at me from the broth along with it's seven sizzling sisters!

Well I thought, at least Dom will be happy!

I continued to make the soup and called the boy through for lunch, steeling myself and my taste buds for the assault to come.

Even he admitted it was VERY hot soup and we both had to blow our noses several times whilst eating it. But it was so hot it was funny and actually despite that was really delicious. We sort of smiled and laughed and slurped and gasped our way through it. My eyes even watered at one point and Dom had a few coughs as it hit the back of his throat, over and over again!

I won't give the recipe dear reader for fear of doing you an injury. But if any hardened chilli fans wants to leave me a post and request I will email you the details.

And joy of joys, there is more left over to have for tomorrow's lunch at work. I must remember to take some tissues...

wasaaaaaaaaaaaaaabi peas

Do you remember those awful ads for Bud where frogs said "whasaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap". Horrible. Stupid men everywhere said it, over, and over, again.

Anyway, no recipe, just an excuse to show you wasabi peas - have you had them? If not, get some, they are really, really delicious. Just be careful - too many in too short a space of time can give you what is now know in our house as 'wasabi nose' which is a bit like ice cream nose, except possibly more painful. Just one of the side effects of being greedy!

ready meals

Don't worry, I haven't gone mad and started buying actually ready meals. Even though I have been really busy recently and the last week in particular has been a total whirl, I haven't been that bad!

This is one of the beauties of batch cooking and leftovers. Here we have Peposo, a Jamie Oliver recipe (love him, did I say already? Yes? Oh good) from this book which I batch cooked a while ago along with red cabbage and some root vegetable mash, both of which were salvaged from cooking too much.

I thought this meal, grabbed from the freezer one morning last week and gratefully heated and eaten that evening, fitted in well with my current crusade to cook economically and not to waste food. The Peposo uses shin, a very cheap and tasty cut of meat and the rest, well, cheap as chips (as Jamie would say) and all vegetables bought from my local green grocer.

And when you are sat slaving away at your desk, mobile in one hand, mouse in the other, the thought that this is waiting for you at home is just enough to get you through.