Waste Not!

With emphasis these days on benefits of “eating local,” knowing where our food comes from and how it’s grown, many of us strive to purchase from local farmers, or even grow our own.

If we think of food as a precious resource, our goal should be to utilize as much of it as possible, and that’s where creativity happens in the kitchen! We can transform leftovers into a new dish the next day, use “non-glamorous” ingredients like vegetable scraps, bread heels, overripe fruit, onion skins, and shrimp shells for new purposes, and even compost what we cannot use any longer.

So, instead of tossing those broccoli stems, try sautéing them with garlic and butter; use bruised or freezer-burned fruit in a cobbler; toss that parmesan rind into soup; mix beet greens into smoothies; make stock with shrimp shells or veggie scraps and onion skins; pickle kale or collard stems; or make crumbs from bread heels.

In these small ways, we honor our food and all the hard work that went into getting it to our tables.