Friday, 19 April 2013

Waste Not, Want Not

Is there any more depressing sight than fruit and vegetables on the turn?  They just make me feel sad.  I'm not the sort of person that buys up a bag of slightly squishy fruit for £1 at the end of market day.  I can't bear the sight or smell of overly ripe bananas, let alone contemplate eating them.

I explain all of this just so that you know my starting point.  I'm not one of those people who never wastes anything and who can whip up a delicious meal from a a few out of date eggs, a parsnip and some wilting lettuce.  Although to be honest, you'd have to be a a culinary genius to pull that one off.  I throw things away.  Probably things that could be used.  And in a weird way, the advent of the brown bin has made me feel less bad than I should about it.  As if the fact that its being composted somewhere is OK because at least its not going to landfill.

But writing this blog has made me pay attention to what I'm buying and I've started to wonder if we could use more and waste less.  I came across this brilliant website 'Love Food Hate Waste' which has a page of facts and statistics that make interesting and scary reading.  Did you know that we throw away 7.2 million tonnes of food and drink from our homes every year in the UK, and more than half of it we could have eaten?  Or that wasting this food costs the average household £480 a year, rising to £680 for a family with children?

So when I opened the fridge to find some puckered and softening tomatoes staring back at me, I decided to make soup.  I forgot to take photos until I'd already started chopping so you'll have to take my word for it that they were unhappy looking tomatoes.  There still weren't enough of them to make soup though, so I bought some more at Fresh & Fruity, the greengrocer on Dyer Lane.  They had loads of choice so I bought these lovely little ones


and a whole bag of older, bigger ones for 50p.  They were still firm and nice looking though so it was a real bargain.

I found an easy recipe in Jamie Oliver's 30 Minute Meals which was basically to put all the tomatoes (big ones quartered) in a roasting dish with a halved chilli, some crushed garlic and some olive oil....


... roast them in the oven until they go soft and start to colour.  While they're cooking, fry some chopped red onions until they're soft then add balsamic vinegar (he says 4 tablespoons) and allow to cook off before pouring in your cooked tomatoes.


Then add your basil and blitz in a food processor (or I did it in the pan with stick blender).


I think I probably added seasoning somewhere along the line and I also added some water because it was a bit thicker than I wanted.

The end result was this.


Probably all the better for being made with a few really ripe tomatoes.  So I'd count my first real foray into wasting less as a success and I feel like I did a good thing.

I've probably heard the phrase 'Waste Not, Want Not' a thousand times without giving any thought to its meaning but today I looked it up.  It probably originated in Yorkshire and means that if you waste nothing, you will want for nothing.  Well, I'm not sure I completely buy that philosophy but if I could save 480 quid this year, I'd be a very happy girl.

2 comments:

  1. That looks very tasty and a very good thing you did for the sad tomatoes

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  2. Tamasin Day Lewis wrote this recipe years ago. Naught Jamie!

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