Using up waste

I’m waiting for the pastry to thaw. We’re having Little Bacon Flans for dinner tonight. I always keep any leftover bits of shortcrust pastry & put them in the freezer. Eventually, as today, there is sufficient to do something with without making any fresh.

We seem to be doing a bit of using up. Yesterday ended up as the Fox’s excellent Kipper & Egg Kedgeree, using up some cream – a bit more will go in today’s flans.

Wednesday will see the using up of a half tin of coconut milk, probably in a prawn curry.

A couple of weeks ago we watched an episode of “Food and Drink” (BBC2 Monday 8.30pm) in which they discussed the amount of food that just gets binned. Apparently the average household throws out a couple of hundred pounds worth of food that has gone off, is out of date, or people don’t know what to do with.

We couldn’t help thinking that doesn’t apply to us. Most of our food waste is potato peelings, outer sprout leaves, carrot peelings etc. Our green bin only ever has a thin layer at the bottom unless there is a lot of garden rubbish & even then most of it goes in the compost bin.

I suppose it comes partially from the discipline of not having much money for years. The only way you can eat reasonably well is to eat every bit of what you buy. So, as today, 2oz of bacon becomes bacon flans, 2oz of minced beef becomes Cornish pasties etc. It doesn’t just go in the bin. Even though these days when we are financially much better off, we still enjoy these economical meals from time to time.

I suppose the other factor was growing up in post war Britain. Certainly in my family, anything that may be useful was kept for re-use. So we had drawers of paper bags & string for example. I still cannot understand how charities put out collection bags to be filled only with clothes of less than two years old. I wouldn’t have bought something unless I liked it enough to wear it for more than that! I’m still wearing some clothes from schooldays & I’m nearly 60!

 In fact I generally feel cheated if things don’t last at least 5-10years. That’s one of the things about modern technology that bugs me. I felt our old computer was still fairly new at over 10 years, whereas the reality is, as with most modern technology, it was obsolete even at the time we purchased it. But as long as things keep working I don’t see the point of changing.

As you will have realised by now, waste is one of those things I hate.

End of diatribe.