Like leaving a night out early or abandoning a TV box set halfway through, throwing out food always feels like admitting defeat. Let’s face it, that’s the only reason you’ve held onto your miscellaneous ‘freezer food’ that you have no intention of eating, but refuse to throw out.
You know the drill – you drag yourself to do a food shop, obviously eat all the good stuff first, and eventually you’re just left with the dregs – stale bread, old milk and rotting vegetables. Yum. To help you put off that next food shop a bit longer, we’ve come up with some ways to give your old food a new lease of life. You’re welcome.
Stale bread
You’ve got a loaf of bread that's going a bit crusty (and not in a nice way) but hasn’t reached full-on mouldy just yet. Not ideal for sandwiches, but perfect for making breadcrumbs. I know what you’re thinking: I have no need for breadcrumbs, I want bread in its full form. But breadcrumbs are handier than you might think.
Throw some on top of a pasta bake for extra crunch, or if you want to be really thrifty (and why wouldn't you?) you can make fishcakes with leftover mash, tinned fish and your newfound supply of breadcrumbs.
And hey, even if your loaf has the beginnings of mould on it, just cut it off – there’s no judging here.
Squashed tomatoes
Put down the basics pasta sauce – it may only cost 50p, but it tastes pants. If you’ve got a load of tomatoes that are on their last legs, make your own pasta sauce instead. Fry up an onion and a few cloves of garlic (both things that laugh in the face of their ‘shelf life’), chop up your ropey tomatoes and whack them in. If you’ve got any other veg – mushrooms, peppers, courgettes – that have seen better days, chuck them in, too. If you want to push the boat out, throw some herbs in – nothing fancy, your faithful packet of ‘dried mixed herbs’ you've had since 2008 will do the job.
Blackened bananas
You’ve bought a big bunch of bananas in an attempt to eat more fruit. At the end of the week, they’re still sitting there uneaten and, now more black than yellow, they're looking fairly unappealing. But don’t reach for the bin bag just yet. You can redeem your attempt at being healthy by making a big batch of smoothies.
Buy a cheap pot of plain yoghurt (basics will do), blitz it up with your mushy bananas and voila, you have a basic smoothie base. To make it more interesting, add a spoonful of peanut butter, some frozen berries, or a handful of oats if you want something more filling. Add a bit of water if you don’t want it to be super thick. Freeze portions of the smoothie in sandwich bags (unless you've really got your shit together in the tupperware department) and breakfast is sorted for next week.
Sprouting potatoes
As far as I’m concerned, potatoes do not go off – they're in the same family of onions and garlic ie kind of indestructible. Yes, they may go a bit green or grow some interesting looking sprouts – but just cut those bits off and pretend they were never there. Once you've dealt with the dodgy bits, make some ‘rustic’ (read: misshapen) wedges. Chop them up into something that vaguely resembles wedges – they won’t be exactly uniform once you’ve hacked off all the bad bits but who are you trying to impress anyway? Drizzle with oil, season with salt and pepper and cook in the oven at 180-degrees for about 30 mins, depending how big the pieces are. Again, I point you in the direction of your old friend ‘dried mix herbs’ for a bit of extra flavour.
READ MORE: The Lunch You Can Make To Eat All Week When All Your Pots And Pans Are Dirty
Rotting vegetables
So rather than a place to store bottles of mixer, you’ve finally started using your fridge vegetable draw for its intended use – well done. The only problem is, with it being hidden away you kind of forgot about all that veg and now it’s distinctly less fresh than when you bought it last week. After you’ve bothered shelling out for fresh veg, this is kind of a devastating state of affairs. But all is not lost – make soup out of your sad veg and you’ll soon forget it was once a pile of rotting greens.
This is a kind of one-size-fits-all approach that you can just adapt to suit whatever you have. Chop up an onion and a few garlic cloves and fry in some oil. Grab a stock cube, boil the kettle and make 800ml of stock. Once the onions and garlic are cooked, add them to a big pot along with your veg and the stock. Cook on a low simmer for about 20 minutes, or until the veg is cooked. Blitz it up and you’re good to go. If you’ve got some curry powder knocking about, add a spoonful to the onions to add a bit of spice. Alternatively, use up the dregs of that pesky jar of Thai curry paste by adding a spoonful with the onions plus a bit of coconut milk. Suddenly, your rotten veg soup is tasting pretty goddamn fancy.
Sour milk
Let's get one thing straight: there is a difference between sour and rotten milk. If you’ve left your milk out of the fridge or in the sun all day, then you should probably let it go. But if it’s just getting a bit past it in the safety of your fridge, it might still be useable. You’ll probably want to avoid using sour milk on cereal and in tea, but it can be used in baking. So I’m going to convince you to make soda bread with milk that's on the turn. I know, I know, who has time to bake their own bread? But if I haven't lost you at ‘sour milk’ then stick with me.
Soda bread is made from just four ingredients and doesn’t even involve yeast for God’s sake. All you need is flour, salt, bicarbonate of soda and buttermilk – which is where you can sub in your sour milk instead. You basically just mix all your ingredients into a dough, knead for a minute then it’s ready to bake. For more specific instructions, BBC Food has a super easy recipe.
This isn’t Bake Off, so don’t worry about soggy bottoms, proving, or making it a show stopper – just whack it all in the oven for about 30 mins and hello fresh bread made from not so fresh milk. If you’re not going to eat it all within a few days, slice it up and freeze it to keep it fresh. Though, of course, if it does go a bit stale, you can always make breadcrumbs...
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Picture: Li Hui
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.