Freezer Roulette

I don't know about you but my kitchen is bursting at the seams with food, in the fridge, in the freezer and in the cupboards.  What's the problem with that, I hear you ask.  Well, it's because some of it has been there for a long time.  Instead of using it up I go out and buy more food, and the jars and packets and tins spread out over the surfaces until there's very little room left to work.  It's got to stop one day and the New Year seems the best time to begin.

So, starting tomorrow, I've set myself the challenge of preparing a meal based around at least one ingredient from my stockpile.  I'm beginning with the freezer.

For the uninitiated, this is an Arbroath smokie, a smoked haddock, originating from Auchmithie, a fishing village a few miles north of Arbroath.  My smokie was one of two I bought at the Tobacco Factory market some time ago. We ate the first one the day we bought it, dotted with butter, flashed under the grill, with Mark's oaty groaty bread and diced beetroot.  Its partner was frozen for a later date, which is now tomorrow.

A quick Google produced the ideal recipe, Cullen Spink, a variation on the traditional Cullen Skink.  I have enough potatoes, onions and other ingredients to produce a meal for two.  I know that my daughter will not eat so smelly a fish, and will be happy enough with yesterday's leftover sausage casserole.

Now that wasn't too hard, was it?

Buttering us up?

I've been drawn to the latest Lurpak ads, which advocate a return to an 'old fashioned' way of life - homecooked food, quality over presentation, the celebration of simple pleasures, the virtue of patience and zero waste. I love them!

Unfortunately for Lurpak they have not persuaded me to switch to their brand. I'll stick to my local butcher who sells a very acceptable variety wrapped in environmentally friendly paper.

Surprisingly, although Lurpak's website features a tempting selection of recipes, it says nothing about the recyclability of their packaging.

Day 3 - Saturday 3 October 2009

This morning I emptied all the vegetable drawers in my fridge and washed them and the ever-so-useful green sponge cushion I bought from Lakeland. The leftover vegetables went into the soup pot and the clean drawers were filled with the contents of yesterday's organic vegetable box.

Before you fall back in admiration at my efficiency, let me assure you that it is not aways so. All too often I leave the fruit and vegetables to lie in their boxes until I need them, only to find that they have suffered, sometimes irredeemably, from neglect. I regret that I have, more often than I care to admit, thrown away food that would have been perfectly fine had it been stored properly, but that had rotted in a plastic bag or wilted in the dark recesses of the box.

However today was different and I'm hoping will be a sign of things to come.

Soup is an excellent vehicle for using up odd bits of vegetables, including anything too sad to be presented whole on a plate. I started by sweating a chopped leek in a glug of olive oil and a knob of butter. To this I added a wilted head of kale, a runt of white cabbage, an odd spring onion and a couple of potatoes. When the vegetables had softened and were just beginning to colour I covered them with water and a bit of milk, added a few teaspoons of Marigold bouillon powder and left them to simmer, covered, for 20-30 minutes. Finally I blended them to a smooth puree, poured the mixture into a plastic container and put it in the fridge for tomorrow's lunch.

While I was making the soup I baked a couple of old beetroots in the oven. They went into a low (150 C) oven in a casserole with a tight fitting lid and a couple of tablespoons of water for 3 hours. When they were cool enough to handle I skinned and chopped them and tossed them in a couple of tablespoons of honey and mustard dressing. I ate some of this salad for lunch alongside a couple of slices of cold meat that had reached their use by date. The rest went into the fridge for another day.

I went out to a party in the evening so I didn't eat with the rest of the family, but they tucked in to a stir fry which included, among other ingredients, a handful of carrot sticks recovered from my daughter's lunch box on Thursday and a portion of lightly boiled green beans left over from dinner that same day. Sir fries are another excellent way of using up leftover, raw and cooked and my husband is very skilled in rustling up a delicious meal using nothing more than a packet of noodles, the leftovers from the fridge and a couple of store cupboard essentials (ie soy sauce, pad thai paste and sesame oil).

So today's items for the bin were:

5g breakfast cereal
265g vegetable peelings
1 used tea bag
50g grape waste (stalks, pips and squidgy ones)
90g sweetcorn husks
65g beetroot peelings
1 large tomato

The raw vegetable waste fed the worms. The tea bags went into the compost bin. The beetroot peelings were cooked and went into our council household waste bin.

The only items of real waste were the breakfast cereal, broken pieces from the bottom of the bag, and the tomato, which came from our own plant but which was bruised and had sat on the work surface for a day or so longer than it should have and had gone too soft to be edible. On reflection I could have fed the cereal to the hamster but it went into the brown bin instead.