Читать книгу Zero Waste Cooking For Dummies - Rosanne Rust - Страница 59

Once you’re home, you need to know when and how you’ll cook and store the food you purchased. You’ll want to properly store the food you bought right away. (More on how to rethink your food storage habits in the next section.) As you plan for zero waste cooking, think about what you might cook early in the week that creates leftovers to use throughout the rest of the week. Ideally, many cooked leftovers can serve as a time-saving step for a new meal another day. For instance the leftover cooked pork from the Spice Rubbed Pork Tenderloin with Roasted Sliced Grapes can create the quick Pork Pita Pockets with Cucumber Cream later in the week for a quick lunch. Also, plan to use the more perishable fresh fruits and vegetables from your shopping haul first.

You’ll find a lot of ideas in this book for using up leftovers and even food scraps. For example, the next time you bring home a rotisserie chicken for dinner, don’t throw out the carcass. Instead, bag it up, save it in the fridge, and add any veggie scraps to it over the next few days. Then you can throw it all into a large pot of water and boil it down for stock to be used to flavor new dishes or add to soups and sauces. (Check out the Homemade Stock recipe in Chapter 10.)

Finding new recipes that make the most of your leftovers (see Part 3) is also going to help you reduce waste. You may have noticed that food seems to have gotten, well, bigger, over the years. I’m talking about those muffins as big as your head and half-pound dinner portions of pasta. It’s sometimes just too much. When dining out, simply reducing the portions you eat can ultimately help reduce food waste (and bonus — help you maintain your health). Instead of cleaning your plate or sending leftover food back to the kitchen, you may come up with more creative ways to use that doggy bag, beyond just reheating it for lunch the next day.

You can even create cocktail garnishes out of some of your food waste or scraps. Parts from a zested lemon can become Sugared Citrus Peels, and the liquid from a can of chickpeas (aquafaba) can be whipped for a whiskey sour. Celebrating your zero waste goals at the end of the day with a refreshing mocktail or cocktail sounds like a good deal to me!

While you may not be able to reuse every scrap or spoiled food, some food waste can continue to work for you (feed a houseplant) or the planet (composting). Things that often go into the garbage (citrus peels, leafy greens, vegetable peels) can be turned into compost. (I cover what and how to compost in Chapter 4.) Other common items like coffee grounds can be sprinkled on house plants or over your garden to balance or nourish the soil (they may help repel garden pests, too).