I've decided to reduce the amount of food I throw away. I've wanted to do this for a while, as it's good for both my family's finances and the environment.
So I've been thinking about our habits in the kitchen and how to modify them so that less food ends up in the trash.
Here I share them with you, and if you have any more suggestions, leave them below, as all ideas will be welcome.
- Use overripe fruit and vegetables to make delicious and healthy desserts and snacks: with bananas, cake or smoothies; with apples and pears, sauce; with cucumbers, tomatoes and zucchini, sauces or purees.
- Plan your meals for each day of the week before you go shopping, but leave one or two days for leftovers, or make a meal with whatever you haven't used: for example, a vegetable stir-fry with a little bit of everything seasoned with Tamari, and served with brown rice. These leftover meals are often the most popular, even if they aren't the prettiest.
- Make broths with leftovers: stems and peels for vegetable broth, bones for chicken broth.
- Composting stems, peels, etc. At home I don't have the space to compost, but I can store what I used to throw away in the freezer and then take it to a place where they can compost it.
- Adapting recipes to what I already have: I love to cook, and when I follow a recipe exactly, it tastes better. But if I don't have everything I need, but I do have ingredients to substitute, I'll do it without any problem. This is more difficult to do in baking, but for everyday recipes, I don't mind much if I use a different ingredient instead of one.
- Base snacks on what you have at home, instead of buying snacks. At home, we prefer homemade food and fresh fruit for snacks, but sometimes we fall into the habit of buying crackers and other convenient snacks. Not only are they expensive and less healthy, but they usually come packaged, and I want to reduce the amount of single-use packaging as well.
- If I see something isn't being eaten, I put it in the freezer to use later. This is easy to do with fruit—bananas are best peeled, and apples and other fruits with seeds are chopped up so you can use them in smoothies. But you can also do it with cakes (sliced so you can eat them individually), cookies, or extra portions from lunches and dinners that you know no one will eat in time—just remember to label it well and don't forget to use it.
How do you reduce the amount of food that ends up in the trash?
1 comment
Anonymous
Gracias por tus recomendaciones, algunas de ellas las estoy haciendo desde hace mucho, me entristece ver que algunas personas lleguen a tirar tanta comida, en fin, lo he compartido en Facebook, gracias amiga