Our trashcans, fridges and garbage disposals are filled with bones, crusts, peels and expired food day after day. Some of us are smart enough to have compost piles in their backyard, but most of us don’t and that’s what causes massive quantities of food to be thrown away daily. Luckily, you can now cut down on your waste – and save some money – by using the following tasty kitchen hacks.
- Make a tasty vegetable stock out of you leftover produce.
Save all the peels, skins, and stems of the vegetables that you used for your roasts, salad, stews and soups. Set these leftovers aside on a re-sealable bag or a big bowl covered with plastic wrap, and keep it in the fridge until you’re ready to cook a veggie stock out of it. Just avoid keeping it in the fridge for too long though, since these scraps can quickly rot and growing moulds in your leftovers will defeat your purpose of saving it and recooking it into a tasty stock.
Homemade vegetable stock contains lots of nutrients and can even be used as a base for sauces or soups. If you want, you can even drink it on its own – it’s really that good! In fact, you can even use it as replacement for the water you use when preparing rice. Preserve your veggie stock by storing it well in the freezer.
- Cook a tasty broth using the leftover bones on your meals or parties.
Just like with vegetable stock, bone broth is also delicious and nutritious, and serves as a great way to savour every last bit of goodness from the leftover bones. Fish bones and heads are the easiest to recook into a savoury broth. Simply add the leftover bones into a stockpot of water, and bring it to boil. After that, strain the broth carefully until it’s free from all the pointy fish bones.
Leftover turkey and chicken bones can be used as well. Just toss a few handful of herbs like parsley, rosemary, sage and thyme as you cook your broth to make it even tastier. Apart from the chicken and fish bones, beef bones also make a delicious broth. This can be a bit complicated though, since larger beef bones need to be broken down so that you’ll get the flavourful and nutritious stuff into your stock.
Just remember to keep an eye to your bone broth as you cook it, and make sure that you skim off the scum that rises as the broth cooks. Don’t wait to do this until you’re done cooking, or you’ll just let it fall back into the bottom of your pot.
- Turn your stale bagel and bread into tasty desserts.
Although I wasn’t one to request that the crusts of my bread be cut off as a kid, I’m not a huge fan of tough crusts and end pieces of bread today. Instead, I save these unwanted ends of stale bread in a reusable bag and place them in the freezer.
Whenever I’m making a recipe that requires breadcrumbs, I simply pull out a few pieces of frozen bread and crush them in the food processor until they turn into crumbs. A quick way of doing this is to give them a spin while they’re still frozen. For larger bread slices, I turn them into a delicious homemade bread pudding.
If you ever find yourself with lots of extra bagels instead, here’s a simple and tasty solution for that. Slice your stale bagels as thinly as possible, place them on a cookie sheet, drizzle with olive oil, and toast until they turn into brown bagel chips. Sprinkle the chips with sea salt, and serve it with whipped cream cheese.
- Save your overripe bananas by making delicious banana breads.
In some ways, bananas are considered the perfect food: sweet and soft, jam-packed with potassium and other nutrients that the body needs. Finding a perfect banana, however, is a more complicated feat since it requires much skill, and finding one is just imperfect science.
So rather than throwing away your overripe bananas, save them in a clean freezer bag and use them to make a delicious banana bread. Just remember to keep your bag of chocolate chips and walnuts on hand at all times, so you’ll be ready to make a batch whenever you get to collect enough bananas. Overripe bananas may look gross, but once they’re baked into a banana bread, they’ll definitely tasted amazing!
Now that you’ve absorbed all the clever food-saving tips as shared by some Singapore food experts and chefs, it’s now time to start cooking, eating and reducing food waste!
