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The 3 R’s – Routine, Rationing and Rules can all help to reduce snacking

Eat at routine times

Have set meal and snack times. This means that everyone should in theory be full up enough not to want to eat in between times and will reduce snacking.

Space meal and snack times with a good gap between them. Then you (and/ or your kids) won’t be so full up that you don’t want your meals.

When my kids were much younger, they would have breakfast, a mid-morning snack, lunch, mid afternoon snack and then dinner. I ended up joining in with them. We’ve all got out of that habit now that they are older, but it worked really well at the time.

This is just an example and it’s up to you how many snack slots you need in your day. Find a system that works for you and adjust it as things change.

Ration out food to reduce snacking

Put limits on the amount of snacks that can be eaten and what everyone is allocated for the day. It’s a bit like sending your kid off to primary school with a packed lunch – they can’t eat anything extra because they don’t have anything else with them. You could make a pack up at the beginning of the day with the snacks for each person to reduce snacking. The nice thing about this is that you can let them decide when to eat them and they feel in control.

Get the snack portion sizes right too. Just before lockdown I finally got round to buying some tiny tubs* to put raisins in. They are a great reusable replacement for little boxes of raisins. As well as making them easy to transport, they limit the amount of raisins eaten in one go. I bought them to give them at school pick up, but they work equally well at home too.

It is also usually cheaper to buy a bigger packet of something. Then decant the leftovers into boxes, tins or tubs to use another time. Always make sure you price check first though!

Set rules over which foods can be eaten when

Set rules over which foods can be eaten outside of meal times. You can have different rules during the week to on the weekends. I find this helpful to limit the amount of sugary and salty foods eaten. For example you could say that outside of set meal and snack times family members can only snack on fruit and vegetables. Perhaps you will only allow sweet foods on the weekends.

You might find that just doing one of these things helps. But you can do some or all of them – whatever works for you.

If you are looking for some ideas for snacks check out my list of 5 homemade zero waste snacks

The post Take back control of snack time, with routines, rationing and rules appeared first on Eco Thrifty Living.

The challenge is over now. However if you want some more ideas for how to stretch your food, check out how these UK Money Bloggers do it (plus a tip from me).

How do you stretch food out to make it go further?

Cut it up!

One of my favourite ways to use less food, is to cut things up into small pieces. One small potato wouldn’t seem very much on it’s own as a side. But if you cut it up into small cubes and bake or fry them, it looks like a bigger portion. Chop one or two small veggie cocktail sausage into a bowl of pasta and it seems like there is plenty. Compare that to just putting one or two sausages in the bowl with the pasta, which doesn’t seem like much.

Another bonus tip I have to make good use of your crumbs!

Make the most of your freezer

I freeze most things if they stay still long enough. Bread, meat, fish, veg, grated cheese and chopped up herbs frozen with water in ice cube trays. Frozen fruit is handy for smoothies and overnight oats, when it’s tricky to get fresh. If I make vats of soup to use up tired veg, or a massive bolognese, I’ll freeze portions as home-made ready meals for any time I’m too tired to cook. – Faith from Much More with Less

Stretch food, by saving scraps for soup

Instead of throwing away small leftovers and clean peelings of veg, pop them into a large tub in the freezer. Keep filling with oddments until you have enough to make a vegetable soup. Serve the soup as a meal and don’t forget to freeze any leftovers. – Money Saving Central

Check dates and rotate food

Make sure you check the dates while you’re putting things away and rotate so the closest dates are at the front of your fridge/cupboards to get used first. (The first in first out/FIFO system) – Miss Many Pennies

Write a meal plan to stretch food out

My tip is to try and meal plan through the week – think about what you might like then only buy groceries to those particular recipes – it simply makes you likely to waste less. Dan from The Financial Wilderness

Use up your leftover bread

Bread products and bread ends that the kids usually dont like, make a lovely bread pudding. Also you can set cooking challenges for dinner times where family members do a ready steady cook type challenge and then Come Dine With Me. Joleisa.com

Bread is one of the most wasted items and this post has masses of ideas on how to use up bread. Lesley – Thrifty Lesley

Turn brown bananas into milkshake

Never throw away browning bananas! Peel them and freeze the bananas. Blended with your favourite type of milk they make instant and delicious frozen milkshakes in seconds. Add strawberries or a scoop of chocolate powder to add more flavour! Victoria – Lylia Rose

Use online tools to find recipes for random foods

If you can’t work out what to eat with the random foods in your kitchen, use a tool like SuperCook which finds recipes based on what’s you’ve got. Naomi – Skint Dad

Colour code foods to remember use by dates

My tip is to colour-code food in the fridge and in cupboard with coloured labels (can use ribbons or colour a piece of paper and stick it to the package). E.g Red=food that goes off by end of week 1; blue=food that goes off by end of week 2, etc. I did this for a lady with dementia and it worked really well. Jennifer – Monethalia.com

Shop your cupboards. Freeze foods that won’t last, or use them up.

The main thing to do usually is to shop your cupboards, fridge and freezer. Make a meal plan using what you have and only buy anything you need that you don’t already have in. If you have extras in, the priority would be to keep it useable until you are ready to eat it.

Meat and meat products can all be frozen. As can most other things. Fresh potatoes can be turned into mash and frozen, or have a few lunches of baked potatoes to use them up. Onions can be chopped and frozen. Prepare carrots and freeze them ready to be used in soup and casseroles. Similarly peppers.

No room left in the freezer? Look at what needs using up first and meal plan around that. Any tasty mix can be made into a soup, used as the base of a savoury crumble, used as a pie filling or used as pizza topping.

Lesley – Thrifty Lesley

Share what you can’t use

I think it is so important to share – before you EVER throw food away consider if you could leave it on a neighbours doorstep (safely of course). Becky – Baby Budgeting

Still want more ideas to stretch food?

Have a look at my big round up of ways to use up food here – a challenge to avoid food waste for a day and a round up of use it up ideas.

The post Find out how 11 UK Money Bloggers stretch food between shops appeared first on Eco Thrifty Living.

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Why did the picture change so dramatically so quickly? We kept being told there was plenty of food in the system. Everything would be just fine if we would only stop stockpiling. But we were also told various other things to with the general message being boiled down to stay at home.

It suddenly made sense to a lot of people to have some extra food in the house, so that they could stay at home. Britons made 80m extra grocery shops in a month . There have been reports of stockpiling around the world too. There are now a lot of full cupboards, fridges and freezers up and down the country.

Why do we need to make our food stretch?

1. It is difficult to top up our supplies in the same way we have been used to. Many jobs hang in the balance too and money may be tight for future grocery shops.
2. Food waste is terrible for the environment. It gives off methane in landfill which is a greenhouse gas far more potent than CO2
3. All that money we spent will go to waste too if the food ends up in the bin!

How can we make our food go further? By making a meal plan!

Are you ready for the Stretch Meal Plan Challenge to make Lockdown Food Last? Next week, starting Monday and ending on Sunday, I’m going to be running the challenge in my Reduce Your Food Waste Facebook Group. You can also join in the chat on Twitter and Instagram using the #StretchMealPlanChallenge and #MakeLockdownFoodLast hashtags and tag me on @ecothrifty. I would love to see your pictures of you doing the challenge on social media!

There are going to be 3 main parts to the challenge. I will provide lots of help and advice along the way, as well as tips for how to get the kids involved too.

1. To start off with we will be making an inventory of the food we have
2. Then we will think about ways we can stretch the food out.
3. By the end of the challenge, you have a meal plan that makes your food go as far as possible!

Join in the Stretch Meal Plan Challenge for a chance to win

***Update: THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED. The winner was selected and they received their prize. **

I’m also going to be running a competition alongside this too. One lucky person will win an e-copy of my book Eco Thrifty Living* and half an hour virtual one to one personalised coaching session with me over how to keep your food waste low. To be in with a chance to win:

1. Sign up to my mailing list – you will also get access to the first chapter of my book all about how to reduce your kitchen waste when you sign up.
2. Join the Reduce Your Food Waste Facebook group if you haven’t already
3. Comment on the pinned post that I will share in the Facebook group about the challenge.

The challenge will run between the 6th and 12th April 2020. The competition will open today on 2nd April 2020 and will close to new entries by midnight (UK time) 12th April 2020. There will be a pinned post with all the information you will need to join in the challenge in the Facebook group, which I will update throughout the challenge. For full t’s and c’s see here: Terms and conditions for the competition .

I look forward to chatting to you all in the Facebook group!

The post Take the Stretch Meal Plan Challenge to Make Lockdown Food Last for a Chance to Win! appeared first on Eco Thrifty Living.

This blog post contains affiliate links marked with * and anything you buy through them will help to support the blog as I will get a small commission. All opinions are my own and it won’t cost you anything extra to use the links. Thanks!

They might take a bite out of an apple and then decide they don’t want the rest. Or ask for their favourite dinner, only to say they aren’t feeling that hungry when it gets to dinner time. Sometimes kids want to pour out their own breakfast cereal and milk. The problem is that they might overfill the bowl and only make it through half of it. So what can you do about these problems? Here are my top 10 tips for reducing food waste when it comes to kids!

Top tips to reduce food waste when you have children!

Breakfast

Do you make breakfast for your kids or do you let them serve themselves? Either way it can end in half a bowl of cereal being left untouched.

Appetites can vary wildly between kids. Even the same child will want different amounts at times. It will change depending on how hungry they are or if they going through a growth spurt!

So it can be difficult to get the amount of breakfast to serve just right. What can you do about this?

1. Serve a little at a time. They can always have more
2. Put leftovers in the fridge to eat later or the next day.
3. Depending on what they had for breakfast, sometimes you can use it as an ingredient for another recipe! E.g. you can make all kinds of things with leftover porridge including these leftover porridge pancakes . For cereal that would be a bit soggy the next day e.g. rice pops: blend it up and mix it with some fruit to make it into a milkshake.

Packed lunches

As with breakfast, there is no way you can be sure that the lunch you send your kids off with for the day will be eaten.

What you can do is to keep adjusting. If you find they are coming home with waste every day, send them with less. You could also try different foods.

Put their lunch in an insulated lunch bag with an ice pack. If leftovers are kept cool all day they can be put in the fridge for another time.

Food gets bashed around, squished and crushed in a bag. If you put it in boxes and containers, then it will last better.

Main meals

They promised you that they would make it through at least 15 fish fingers and a giant plate of chips and peas. It turns out that two fish fingers was what they really wanted and there were a few too many chips and peas.

What can you do with the leftover fish fingers, chips and peas?

1. Fish fingers: Fish finger sandwiches the next day.
2. Chips: Twice cooked chips can be yummy, so you could re- cook them the next day. Or alternatively use them in a frittata .
3. Peas – they actually make quite a nice sandwich too! Or you could use them to make a pea mint chilli dip.

What about other meals?

1. Pasta, noodles and couscous- these all make a great base for a cold salad for lunch the next day
2. Leftover potatoes. Baked, boiled, mashed or roasted potatoes can be frozen to be used again another time! Cold boiled potatoes are the perfect base for a potato salad and patatas bravas (instead of cooking the potatoes from scratch, just reheat them). Mash is another good way to use up potatoes. Or chop into cubes and use in a frittata .
3. Leftover cooked veg – freeze to use another time or combine with potatoes. You can make veg mash or depending on the veg something like bubble and squeak *Ad*
4. Rice – if you have too much rice you have to be careful to cool it down quickly after cooking and then putting in the fridge or freezer straight away. If you don’t cool your rice quickly enough you risk food poisoning. Read more on how to reuse leftover rice safely here: can reheating rice cause food poisoning?
5. Curries, stews, stir fries, pasta/ rice and noodle toppings. Put them in a container in the fridge. Use as a sandwich filler, add to pies or make into a soup.
6. Leftover meat and fish. Cold meat and fish can be used as sandwich fillings, or freeze for another time. As long as it hasn’t been frozen after being cooked before.
7. Baked beans – if you have cold baked beans in a tin that haven’t been used, there are lots of recipes to use them up. The simplest thing is to put them in a container in the fridge to use another day. If they have been cooked once though I wouldn’t reheat them again. Unless you made them yourself from scratch. You could mash them use as a sandwich spread or use them as the base to make a cold bean dip.
8. Leftover pizza – re-fridgerate and eat cold the next day!

Freezing and reheating rules

If freezing and reheating food follow these rules to make sure it is safe:

1. Make sure the food has fully cooled down before putting it in your fridge or freezer. This is because it can raise the temperature of your fridge/ freezer and warm everything else up in it.
2. Make sure food is only frozen and heated/ re-heated raw once and cooked once. E.g. you could freeze some raw meat, then defrost it and cook it, then freeze it and then defrost it and it cook it again. But you can’t reheat or freeze it again after that. You also can’t add any extra steps e.g. don’t freeze raw meat again after being defrosted and before cooking.
3. When reheating food, make sure it is piping hot all the way through before serving. If you use a microwave, take it out half way through reheating and give it a good stir.

Snacks

What to do if your kids want to snack all the time

There are various reasons why snacks might be a problem with kids. Too much snacking may lead to food waste. This is because they may be less hungry for their meals and are more likely to leave food on the plate. It’s also because they might be eating just for the sake of it, rather than because they are hungry.

The 3 R’s can really help put you and them back in control of snack times. You can pick and choose which one you want to do or you can do a combination of two or three. In short,

• Routine: Set routine snack times
• Ration: Allocate the exact snacks that can be eaten each day
• Rules: Set rules over which types of food can be eaten and when.

I think these R’s help kids to know where they stand, what is and isn’t allowed and means that once they get used to it, they are much less likely to nag about snacks! Read more about the 3 R’s here: Reduce snacking by following the 3 R’s

What to do with half eaten or bruised and bashed snacks

Another problem with snacks, is that sometimes they can get opened, but not finished. Or a bite taken out of but not fully eaten. Sometimes snacks can be bashed about at the bottom of a bag, where they can get bruised, squashed or crushed.

What can you do about this? If you are taking food out and about with you, try to keep it in containers that will protect it from getting squashed. Some foods get squashed easier than others e.g. bananas, so they are better eaten at home, rather than taken out with you. Here are some tips for what to do with problem snack foods:

Apples

I find there are generally two ways that apples can go to waste with kids. The first is that they take a bite and then decide they don’t want the rest. The second is that they or you take an apple as a snack to eat while out and about or at school and it doesn’t get eaten. Then it comes home having been bashed about.

What can you do with an apple that has had one bite out of it?

If your child has taken a bite out of an apple and doesn’t want to eat the rest, you could just eat it or save it for later.

Another alternative, for a kid who would refuse to eat the rest of the bitten apple later, is to chop off the bit that has been bitten. Wash the apple, then core and slice it. Now it is a snack that anyone can eat! You can even put it in a tupperware type container to save for later.

What can you do with bashed apples?

Bashed apples don’t look very appealing to eat raw, but they cook just fine. I collect bashed apples in my fridge to turn into desserts like apple crumble!

Want some more ideas for how to use up apples? Check out this list here: 22 ways to use up apples .

Open packets

Let’s say your child eats half a packet of breadsticks, a bit of a cereal bar, or half a pot of yoghurt. What can you do to reduce food waste for kids in this area?

• Use food clips to reseal packets. I also carry these around with me, if I take food out that might need a clip. I generally try to buy bigger packets of things rather than individual portions, to reduce the amount of packaging overall.
• Decant opened food into tupperware style containers
• Put a clingfilm alternative over the top of the pot of yoghurt to use another time. Again you can reduce packaging waste by buying bigger tubs of yoghurt and dishing up a bit at a time. This way the leftover yoghurt can go into a container with a lid to be used another time.

What can you do with bashed and broken dried snacks?

Savoury:

I used to carry oat cakes around with me as an easy on the go snack and they come in little plastic packets (not ideal I know). The problem I had was that they would turn into crumbs in the packet after a while. I worked out that the crumbs were a perfect substitute for breadcrumbs when making meatballs. This would work well in plant based meatball alternatives too though.

For more ideas to use up crushed crackers, check out these 20 ways to stop wasting bread for the breadcrumb ideas. Substitute the breadcrumbs with the crackers. Grind the crackers finely enough and they can be used as a type of flour substitute too.

Tip: If you want to take crackers out but don’t want them to get crushed, get small containers in the right shape for your crackers.

Sweet:

If you have a broken packet of biscuits or cake crumbs then check out these ideas to use them up: ways to use up sweet crumbs. Ideas include adding them to yogurts and using them to make cheesecake bases.

So there you have it – some ideas to get you started with reducing food waste when it comes to kids!

Taking it further

Educate your kids about the problems with food waste e.g. food waste gives off methane in landfill which is a greenhouse gas and it is a waste of money. They will grow up knowing that food shouldn’t be wasted where possible.

Go easy on yourself and don’t eat leftovers if you aren’t hungry

Go easy on yourself and them. Despite all your best efforts, it is likely food will still be wasted. Keep giving your children new foods to try, even if you don’t think they will eat it. This is because kids need to see a new food lots of times before trying it. Just give them a little of it at a time.

Don’t stress out if you feed them what was their favourite meal last week and they refuse to eat it, because they hate it this week. These things happen!

The best thing to do with a food that is unsafe to be reused, is to put it in the compost. Do this if for example if they have half eaten a food and they have a bug. Or if the food has been left out of the fridge for too long.

Finally don’t feel like you have to eat their leftovers if you aren’t hungry. It is just as much as a waste as if it went in the bin, because you ate food that you didn’t need.

I hope these tips were helpful. Have I missed something off this list? Get in touch and let me know what your top tips for reducing food waste with kids are!

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Today is International Coffee Day, which is a campaign to celebrate coffee and ‘improve coffee’s future’.

I entered into a coffee art competition in New York and decided today would be an appropriate day to share it! I drew the picture to make a positive statement about how to address the waste in the coffee industry.

Shockingly 16 billion disposable plastic lined coffee cups are currently used and thrown away each year. In landfill any natural materials in them give off methane as they decompose. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. However, the cups may also be contributing to the problems of plastic in our oceans.

My drawing is of a reusable cup (as opposed to a disposable one). The cup is filled with coffee beans and grounds. So instead of being thrown away into landfill, they are used to grow a new coffee plant.

Buying a reusable cup, making your coffee at home from loose coffee and composting your grounds can save you money and reduce waste. It is a win-win situation!

Bringing your own cup can get you a discount coffee

If you do want to buy a coffee out, taking your own can get you a discount in some places. In Pret you get 50p off, in Starbucks you get 30p and in Costa 25p. In Waitrose, you can get a free tea in your own cup, if you do a bit of shopping and swipe your Waitrose card. To see a full list of discounted drinks when you bring your own cup take a look at Money Saving Expert

My challenge to all you coffee lovers out there, this International Coffee day is to zero waste your coffee. Get the equipment you need to do that going forward.

If you would like to see more of my drawings take a look here: Zoe’s Zen Art

The post Coffee art for international coffee day! appeared first on Eco Thrifty Living.

Wasting food is also a waste of money. Why buy something that we are never going to use? It doesn’t make sense when you think about it like that. The solution is to avoid wasting food wherever possible!

Bread

• 20 ways to stop wasting bread!
• Croutons

Bananas

• What to do with bananas that are past their best
• Banana icecream recipe
• Beetroot and banana ginger muffin recipe
• Banana tea bread recipe
• What to do with frozen milk and bananas!

Fruit and nuts

1. 22 ways to use up apples
2. What to do with a glut of apples
3. Raspberry avocado sorbet recipe – you can also substitute the raspberries for blackberries.
4. 15 delicious ways to use up blackberries
5. Transform wrinkly kiwis and mushy avocados into a delicious dessert
6. 12 uses for ground almonds

Vegetables

1. Saved from the compost – leaf and stem soup recipe . Did you know you can eat cauliflower, broccoli and radish leaves?
2. Use it up tuna, runner bean and kohlrabi lasagne recipe
3. Sugar free salsa recipe – add in any vegetable you like to this recipe. You can puree it, or make a chunky version.
4. Easy freezer pasta sauce recipe – I love adding in any veg past their best to this recipe and often make an adaptation of this with good sized chunks of veg, so it is a bit like a vegetable stew.
5. Yummy uses for cold chips
6. How to eat an entire squash or a pumpkin with nothing left
7. Beautiful beetroot and butternut squash frittata
8. How to store Jerusalem artichokes and 20 ways to eat them! We once planted some of these and now have no hope of getting rid of them, other than by continuing to eat them! My recommendation is to plant these in a pot if you want to grow them – not in a border!
9. Homegrown under ripe spaghetti squash for dinner! This is one of my most popular posts on the blog! You can eat under ripe pumpkins and squashes – it is like eating a marrow or a courgette (although in a different shape)!
10. Scrumptious butternut squash tea bread recipe
11. How to regrow celery from scrap! This is really fun to do and you can also do something very similar with lettuce!
12. Potato peel crisps
13. Kale crisps

Drinks

1. How to never forget to water the house plants again!
2. 5 ways to use up amaretto

If food waste is regular challenge and you would like bespoke help, I offer 1:1 online coaching over Zoom – it’s £40 for a 40 minute session. Get in touch on ecothriftyliving@gmail.com to book your slot.

Note: A lot of my recipe ideas are sugar free as for a long time I avoided sugar. At the moment I am not sugar free as I fell off the wagon. Anyway there is a mix of ideas in there and if you don’t want sugar, leave it out and if you do – add it in!

The post Stop wasting food with these use it up recipes ideas! appeared first on Eco Thrifty Living.

So I surveyed my Reduce Your Food Waste Facebook group and my Twitter followers. They had loads of great blackberry recipe ideas, which I have listed below:

Cooked blackberry recipe ideas:

1. Crumble – especially good with apples too. Tip – I save apples that have been bashed about at the bottom of a bag when taken out as a snack but not eaten, to use up in crumbles.
2. Banana and blackberry sponge pudding
3. Bramley and blackberry tray bake
4. Pancakes
5. Blackberry jam . Suggestions for variations on this included:
   1. Blackberry and apple jam
   2. Blackberry, raspberry and vanilla jam
6. Apple and blackberry curd
7. Blackberry syrup

What to do with frozen blackberries/ frozen blackberry recipe ideas:

1. Sorbet – e.g. my raspberry avocado sorbet recipe (substitute the raspberries for blackberries). You’ll be surprised at the result and you can’t taste the avocado
2. Banana blackberry (chocolate) ice cream. I love making this sugar free banana icecream recipe – just add blackberries to the mix!

How to use up raw blackberries!

1. Gin infused with blackberries
2. Blackberry and vanilla cordial
3. Banana and blackberrry smoothie
4. Blackberry Lassi
5. Pickled blackberries
6. Add them to your cereal, porridge or yoghurt!

On top of this I love eating frozen blackberries. They are great for a quick cold snack, soothing for a sore throat and make an attractive alternative to an ice-cube! Another great thing about freezing blackberries is that you can eat (and cook) them months out of season and remember those lovely summer blackberry picking days!

What is your favourite way to eat blackberries?

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In the UK, we love, love, love sharing pictures of our food and food blogging has really taken off. Even bloggers who don’t blog exclusively about food often add a recipe to their blog. Or fill their Instagram feed with pictures of #foodporn. I am no exception and my Instagram feed is full of pictures of food!

Food blogging and food waste

These bloggers, vloggers and Instagrammers make food look exciting, tasty and tempting. They are influencing people’s food choices and changing the way we think about food. Food is made to look appealing for a photo shoot, and goes to waste by not being eaten.  Avoiding food waste might not be at the top of the agenda, but it is possible! It just takes a little planning.

Food waste is a massive problem for households in this country. The latest WRAP report states that 70% of post farm gate food waste comes from our homes. This waste costs the average UK family £700 a year and can give off methane in landfill.  Food bloggers are perfectly placed to use their influence to lead the way in encouraging people to reduce food waste.

Emma Dawson from the Food Brood raised the issue of food waste in food blogging in a Facebook group recently. In response I suggested we start up a pledge for people who blog about food to sign up to.

The #NoWasteWithin pledge

The pledge is called No Waste Within. You can use #nowastewithin when sharing on social media. Emma has put together a brilliant website jammed packed with information about the pledge. You can join in with it here: No Waste Within.

Go check it out and get listed on the supporters page!

You can also join the UK Food Waste Bloggers Facebook Group. This is a new group for bloggers to discuss this campaign and food waste and blogging in general. I am currently developing a course to help people reduce their kitchen waste. Send me an email on ecothriftyliving@gmail.com to register your interest and I will let you know when it becomes available.

As a quick overview of the pledge

Write a blog post about the campaign to announce it to your readers to highlight the campaign:

When you’re posts are zero waste you can add the logo and the pledge:

“I promise that no food waste was created by the development, cooking, styling and photographing of this recipe and that, where it wasn’t possible for me to enjoy it myself, I have redistributed, repurposed, retained or recycled the food.” – No Waste Within

For more details and resources relating to the campaign visit No Waste Within Also in case you are wondering, as little food as possible is waste in the making of this blog and I have signed up to the pledge too.

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Amaretto is a sweet liqueur that if stored properly shouldn’t go off for a very long time. Over time though it can reduce in quality. When I did a drinks declutter recently in my home, I found bottles of alcohol that we hadn’t touched for over 10 years. I also found an expensive bottle of sparkling wine that had sadly gone off. I had been saving it for a special occasion, but I waited too long. It is all too easy to buy a bottle for a party or to be given a bottle as a gift and to never quite get around to using it. The sad part about that is, that it is such a waste. 

I’ve now learned my lesson and have no plans to let any alcohol go to waste in my home again. If someone gives us a bottle of bubbly we don’t wait for a special occasion to drink it and if someone gave us something we didn’t want to drink we would find a new home for it.

We do like amaretto though and buy it every so often. To make sure it doesn’t get forgotten about, I asked the Reduce your food waste Facebook group for their suggestions on how to use it up. I’ve shared their ideas below. So if you have a bottle that has lingered a little too long, why not try out one of these ideas!

What to do with your amaretto:

1. Pour over icecream – for added brownie points make this use it up banana icecream!
2. Add a tot to warm milk
3. Soak dried fruit in amaretto and then add to banana bread
4. Use instead of vanilla extract in cooking
5. Make chocolate amaretto truffles (instead of rum truffles)

Thanks to the food waste group for their ideas. If you have anything to add to this please share in the comments below!

Look out for my upcoming blog post next Monday on how to use up pears!

The post 5 ways to use up your amaretto! appeared first on Eco Thrifty Living.

Let’s start with the savoury ones

Savoury apple recipes

1.Grated into coleslaw

2. Apple slices spread with peanut butter as a snack

3. Added to vegetable soup

4. Roasted along with sweet potatoes and parsnips

5. Cooked and mashed with potatoes

6. Apple jelly

7. Bramley apples can be used to make a tomato and apple soup

8. Bramley apple added to a chicken casserole

9. Sliced and fried served with sausages

10. Fried and served with bacon (or fried, sliced, paprika sprinkled aubergine – vegan alternative to bacon)

11. Apple cider vinegar

And now the sweet apple recipes:

1.Apple sponge

2. Apple semolina pudding (can use leftover whey instead of milk if you have some)

3. Stewed

4. Baked

5. Crumble

6. Chocolate / toffee apples

7. Apple cooked with sugar and cinnamon, layered with breadcrumbs fried in a bit of vegetable spread or butter and then chocolate chips stirred into them at the end. Served cold with cream. 

8. Slice the apples thinly and put them in a pan with a little butter some sugar, cinnamon and a squeeze of lemon cook gently until golden brown and serve warm with yoghurt or creme fraiche.

9. Apple butter/ compote

10. Apple and cinnamon cake

11. Apple pie

If you have too many apples to use up all at once, keep them in the fridge because they will last longer than if you leave them out. You could also freeze them – one group member says she removes the core, slices them into chunks and freezes without cooking them for use in puddings. A lovely suggestion also was to make something for a neighbour you haven’t yet befriended. Finally if all else fails put them in the compost or leave them out for the birds.

Join the Facebook group here: The Eco Thrifty Kitchen Club. You can also look back at last weeks post on 12 wonderful ways to use up ground almonds!

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