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Turning Leftovers Into Gourmet Meals

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If you’re looking for some extra space in your budget, you’ll often find that eating out and grocery expenses are the obvious candidates for some careful pruning. While we can often think there is little room to move on our grocery budget, it’s worthwhile thinking about how much food we waste. If we can use all the food we purchase, the benefit to our wallets will be significant. Here are some ideas for keeping food wastage to a minimum, complete with tasty recipes.

Start Small

There are a couple of essential changes you can make to improve your food wastage, even before the food hits the table. Try making recipes to exactly suit your family, including serving initially smaller portions and allowing people to have seconds. The other option is to make a larger batch and freeze the bulk of it, to serve within a couple of days or use as lunches.

Set Up Your Kitchen

Our grandparents would have been appalled with the perfectly good food we throw away. I can remember being in Italy and a woman in a store grabbed the chook, cut of it’s head and it’s feet with the largest knife I had ever seen, removed all the gizzards and then proceeded to wrap the liver, kidney and chicken feet into a separate parcel, to “make soup for the children”. My mum accepted politely, but I don’t think she could quite bring herself to follow the instructions. I’m not suggestion we all go that far, but there are certainly huge advances we could make in how we use food. Always keep a close eye on use-by dates, be sure to note down anything that’s going out of date soon and needs to be used. For all organic matter that you don’t use, compost is a good financial option. Aim to halve what you throw in the garbage bin at the end of every week.

Frugal Desserts

Stale bread in bread and butter pudding (layer with butter, sultanas, adding milk and egg until covered, then bake) is my favourite way to use old bread. In fact, I love it so much sometimes, I get excited if there looks to be any opportunity the bread might get too old. The same is true of rice pudding. Using day old rice, heat butter in a pan and coat rice with it. Then add around one litre of milk and 2 tablespoons of sugar, bring to simmer. Whatever spices tickle your fancy (cinnamon, cloves, a solid dose of masala), add them. Then put pudding into a casserole dish, bake at 140 degrees for 2 hours and voila! Leftover heaven.

Pies

Pies are the perfect answer to a leftover conundrum. For leftover meat and potatoes, use in a pot pie, covered with puff pastry. It’s delicious and no one will suspect they’re eating humble leftovers. For leftover veggies, a quiche with a killer sour cream pastry is your go-to.

Slow-Cooked Stew

It’s not called Irish stew for nothing, the people in green were completely in sync when it came to using up ingredients. The difference in taste is not about using the freshest thing in your fridge. You can use the carrots, potatoes, beans bought optimistically at Coles, and any beef cheeks on offer. The key to a gourmet stew is time, and lots of it.


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