For my final post for Zero Waste Week I thought I’d round-up all of my food waste tips and turn them into a guide on how to reduce food waste with ten easy tips:
One of my favourite ways to reduce food waste is to dry mushrooms in the oven. It’s such a great way to preserve any mushrooms you haven’t managed to eat. Drying mushrooms really intensifies their flavour, and dried mushrooms can be kept in a jar for 6 months or more. They are so tasty when added to soups, stews, casseroles and chilis:
Roasting butternut squash seeds, or any other pumpkin/squash seeds, makes a tasty and healthy snack out of something you’d otherwise throw away:
Banana Oat Cookies are a great way to use up black bananas. They just need three simple ingredients – bananas, oats and peanut butter – but they are so versatile and can be jazzed up with any ingredients you have to hand. I used coconut and chocolate chips as an alternative.
Another great way to use up black bananas is with this healthy pancake recipe that I shared the other day. It’s gluten free and sugar free, but lacks nothing in the taste department!
This vegan banana ice-cream recipe is yet another great way to use up black bananas. Simply freeze your bananas when they start to go black in your fruit bowl, then blend them up to make ice-cream. It couldn’t be easier or tastier!
This guide to freezing lemons is great for freezing all the parts of the lemon – from the zest to the juice. You can even free slices for your drinks – I like mine in a gin and tonic, or straight from the freezer in my herbal tea. I’ve had the cold this week so I’ve been placing the frozen lemon slices in my echinacea tea – it’s a tasty addition! It also helps cool the tea down to a nice drinking temperature.
Here’s a simple tip to make berries last longer in your fridge using one strange ingredient!
I never rely on best before dates on eggs, instead I rely on this simple tip to test egg freshness. All you need is a glass of water!
Similarly, here’s how to tell if milk is bad:
Finally this guide is for anyone wondering what to do with leftover bread?
I hope you enjoyed these 10 easy suggestions to reduce food waste!
What’s your favourite food waste tip?
All images my own apart from the milk (Flickr user macInate) and bread Flickr user Manic Street Preacher) images, licenced under Creative Commons 2.0.
Love how you bought all these ideas together. The one about saving and roasting seeds is fab – because they cost so much to buy and are usually in some kind of non-recyclable packaging. Off to find out how to tell if milk is bad now – I thought you just sniffed it!
Great post, Wendy. I’m going to try the banana oat cookies :)
Great post and loved how you discussed a few ideas like roasting seeds, which generations before us have been doing to preserve the food and now is almost lost practice in regular household. It shows how living sustainable is sometimes reviving old good practices.