I bought 4kg of apples for a ridiculous price (about $2 total, I think). After peeling and coring, the fruit became canned pie filling. The peels and cores were dehydrated (seeds removed), and I've just blitzed them into powder and put them back in the dehydrator (they're still sticky/damp). Once done, I'll use this in baked goods, add it to oatmeal, mix some into treats for the dogs...the possibilities are endless! (I have enough apple scrap vinegar and wanted to try something different this time)

We don't really eat sweet potatoe mash, could we make soup? Something else?

Hello! Like the title says I got 2 limes that have been sitting in my fridge and I decided to release them of their suffering... I have no idea what do to do with them so any recipe would be appreciated. I'm a vegetarian and I'd prefer 1 serving, lower calorie dishes but I could probably tweek them myself. I don't mind if it takes some time, like meal prepping. (Can I use the peel for something?)

I used as a spice for lasagna and I have a huge leftover. Since Saturday I'm trying to find some useful way to use it, but no. It started to haunt me in my dreams. 🙈🙈🙈 Helps appreciated. ❤️

I’m making peach jam and I don’t want to waste the fruit that might get stuck to the pit. I like to boil strawberry tops to get all the flavor out for syrups and I want to do the same with the peach pits and skin, but I can’t figure out if it’s safe.

Hubby and I dropped the seeds from some lemons into some dirt at the end of December. Four months later we’ve got two tiny trees!

I love ginger syrup for cocktails, and I used to make it by putting sliced pieces on stove top with water and sugar. I used the leftover ginger to make candied ginger.

However following some advice from cocktail subreddits, turns out putting chopped raw ginger, sugar, and boiling water in a blender better preserves the ginger flavor as it doesn't all cook out. Strain it in a sieve, and use the juices as syrup/juice. Now I did like the taste of this better, but at the end I was left with this gingery,sugary mush/puree and I wasn't really sure what to do with it. I tried to look up some sweets recipes but couldn't find anything and ultimately just had to discard it.

So any ideas here? It's blended with the sugar so I can't necessarily freeze it and use it in a dish like fried rice later on. But I feel like there's gotta be a dessert or treat I can incorporate it into?

I had a messy freezer with lots of odds and ends of frozen leafy greens, old frozen corn, a chicken breast, and fresh herbs and diced garlic that I’d forgotten about.

Cleaned out the fridge by using the rest of my jar of capers, the rest of my chicken broth, the rest of my cooked rice I made last week, and the last bit of butter.

I also was able to use the last couple drops of many condiments: soy sauce, honey, hot sauce, mustard, and even the last couple tbsp of apple sauce!

Stuck it all in my cast iron after searing the chicken, then stuck it in the oven for twenty minutes. It was delicious!!

It’s wild what you can make out of a dwindling pantry and a fridge/freezer with only “a little bit left of everything”.

Hey!

I absolutely love rhubarb in any kind of cakes, cookies etc. But I just cannot eat so much of the sweet stuff during rhubarb season or I'll gain weight. Even right now I have about one kilo of rhubarb waiting in the fridge and am out of ideas what to do. Could someone please share their favorite recipes to enjoy rhubarb? :)

​

Thank you in advance!

I have ~16oz leftover crushed pineapple sitting in my freezer that I really want to use up. It’s the kind of pineapple that’s nearly completely pulverized and basically a puree. I want to use it for some kind of dinner meal like a curry or something, but most of the recipes I’ve found use chunks of pineapple.

Also would prefer a dish that incorporates vegetables, like not just a pineapple casserole.

Any suggestions would be welcome!!

My kids love to eat boiled eggs but one of them wont eat egg yokes. I regularly have 1 1/2 to 2 already boiled yolks left over. I am working with her to taste some each time but that might take a while before she eats them.

I have already made egg salad with them last week,

this week, potato salad.

Tonight I will add them to my fried rice.

I can’t stand to eat them without any egg white or I would just eat them at breakfast myself.

Maybe sliced on toast with lots of butter?

Any other ideas?

Preferably a dinner idea, rather than pancakes or waffles as we don’t really eat them.

I made this for a bookclub lunch, very tasty. I didn't use the peel from English cucumbers as I don't peel those. https://www.thekitchn.com/recipe-cucumber-peel-sandwich-spread-229479

I think this worked well especially because the tiramisú was too liquid (A house guest brought it).

https://preview.redd.it/kkrv7i51npvc1.jpg?width=1500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3580d0075b745c8410fef3b063a00900f63542cc

Oops

Chapter 8: The No Scrap Left Behind Community

​

It had been two years since my food-waste journey began. By now, I had learned so much and felt ready to share what I knew.

The question was: how?

The typical paths to online stardom didn’t appeal to me. Under no circumstances did I want to make an Instagram account or a YouTube channel where I just talked and talked and people left comments. I didn’t want to spend time taking photos and videos and editing blog articles just so people could see them once and forget about them.

Instead, I wanted a community: a living, breathing thing built by others. A place where people could share their ideas and successes with each other instead of just listening to me. That was my vision. Luckily, a new platform came into my life—Reddit—and it was exactly what I needed.

If you’re not familiar with Reddit, it’s a website made up of communities where people are only allowed to share a very specific type of content on each community. r/turtleswearingstuff is, as you can easily guess, a group (otherwise known as a subreddit) for posting pictures of turtles wearing stuff. A picture of a naked turtle, or a picture of a hatted cow, would be deleted by moderators for being off-topic. It was a perfect place for people to share videos, articles, pictures, questions, and ideas about food waste.

I created the subreddit, put up a few example posts with recipes and food hacks, and started letting people know about us. I posted in r/EatCheapandHealthy, r/ZeroWaste, r/LifeHacks, r/Environmentalism, and more. Posting in twenty-eight subreddits might have been overboard . . . but hey, I don’t like to do things only halfway.

A hundred followers joined in the first hour. That exceeded my expectations! Then an hour later, there were two hundred. Five hundred. I checked my phone all day long, amazed as the numbers jumped higher.

A member of the r/ZeroWaste community left this comment in my post: “I went to No Scrap Left Behind this morning and it was 200, and now it’s 700. What is happening? Why is this so big?”

The subreddit reached one thousand members in a single day. On the second day, it reached five thousand.

Soon, the forum was flooded with posts. They shared their success stories: turning sour milk into soda bread, stale donuts into French toast, and apple cores into syrup. Making broth was a rite of passage, and most of us tried Everything Cookies.

I had envisioned myself as being an adviser for others to turn to, but my food waste warriors, as I would call them, didn’t need my help. A woman posted asking what to do with leftover pickle juice even though it passed the Hungry Kid Test. Within four hours, she had dozens of suggestions like marinading chicken; brining fresh vegetables like celery and carrots; brining tofu; adding flavor to tuna salad, pasta salad, potato salad, egg salad, coleslaw, and homemade ranch; soaking potato slices before roasting them for chips; adding it to stew; using it in sourdough or rye bread; and, of course, “Just chug it.” Someone even suggested using it as “pickleback,” which is a shot of whiskey chased with a shot of pickle juice.

On the r/lifehacks forum, someone said this about us: “These people are intense. They’re saving stuff like canned fruit juice!”

In a short period of time, I became a moderator overseeing tens of thousands of members. It was my responsibility to build a culture around my subreddit and, frankly, to keep everyone in line. Some subreddits expect their members to be nice, like r/wholesomememes, while others are magnets for snarkiness.

I knew right away what the tone of this subreddit should be. A tweet inspired me, actually. It said, “I love how Pinterest is the only place on the internet where people get along. There’s not much to argue about cheesecake recipes.” The tweet spoke to so many people, it got tens of thousands of likes. Maybe I had a similar opportunity to create one of the few places online where people could get along.

Much like the cooks making cheesecake on Pinterest, the vast majority of members were enthusiastic and creative. But some people came in with their figurative fists raised, ready to argue. One user called me a “corporate shill” for “putting the blame of food waste entirely on individuals instead of looking critically at supply chain problems.” Before banning him, I pointed out that a subreddit about supply chains would have been much less popular.

In those early days, people argued about which scraps were safe for dogs. Vegans and vegetarians criticized meat eaters. A member was even criticized for keeping chickens because buying chickens supported the meat industry, even if they weren’t eaten. People argued about expiration dates, of course. If anyone posted unhealthy food, there would be the inevitable, “Just throw it out. You shouldn’t be eating that anyway.” A few were adamant about throwing away food made by Nestlé, as if an evil corporation would care that you threw away their product after buying it.

There was even an argument over the best way to remove egg yolks from the whites. I kid you not. One member insisted that the only way to do it was to separate a single yolk into a small bowl, then add it to the rest of the yolks because that way if you crack open a bad egg, it won’t spoil the rest of the batch. People went back and forth on this for a while and some feelings were hurt. Finally, a member wrote, “This is a weird thing to be so passionate about.” The whole thing reminded me of the egg in Gulliver’s Travels that satirized pointless arguments.

All these problems were easy to fix. Every subreddit gets to make its own rules, so I made these rules for mine: Be nice. No diet shaming. Don’t tell people when to throw away food.

The negativity cleared up. Even when things got ugly, I handled it light-heartedly. Once when two members were arguing over something silly, I wrote, “You two be nice or I’ll put you both on time-out.” Embarrassed, one of the users deleted all her comments in the argument. I could have deleted the comments myself, but this was better.

A culture of kindness built itself up. I found people apologizing for things they didn’t need to apologize for and then the other person apologizing for making them feel the need to apologize. It was like the Canada of Reddit.

I even had to depend on my food waste warriors every now and then. Once Adalyn was excited to make cupcakes all by herself and we were out of vegetable oil, so I used olive oil. This was not the kind of olive oil I had used in baking before. It had a strong flavor that tasted terrible in cupcakes and no one in my family would eat them. Olive oil cake is a thing, but for some reason, it didn’t work at all.

Desperate to save my daughter from disappointment, I made a post asking what to do. The other members pointed out that olive oil cake always has citrus because the two flavors work well together. We made orange frosting, and voilà! The cupcakes were so good that Adalyn proudly shared them with her aunts and uncles.

Our subreddit was a hub for resourcefulness and creativity. My proudest moment was when a member posted, “What part of food do you eat that most people toss?” The answers included kiwi and mango skin, apple core and seeds, the white part of the watermelon rind, watermelon seeds (roasted), strawberry tops, cilantro stems, potato skins, the cores of iceberg lettuce and cabbages, cauliflower leaves, and shrimp with the shell on.

It was also a good place to vent about waste. A user posted about needing to use twelve unsweet cantaloupes (I have no idea how he ended up with so many) and lamented that he didn’t have enough freezer space for them because his freezer was full of rabbit pelts.

“You seem like an interesting person,” posted a member.

The original poster explained that he raised rabbits and killed them for meat, even though it was gut-wrenching to do so. “These animals mean a LOT to me,” he wrote. “I love the animals and I love watching them grow up.” But he felt strongly about self-sustainability and raising food in healthy environments, as opposed to the cruel meat industry. It was a lot of work, and frankly much more expensive than buying meat in the store.

He had zero support from friends and family. The only person who thought he wasn’t a psychotic murderer was his neighbor, so he gave him two of his rabbits. The neighbor left them in the fridge too long and threw them out.

“I put lots of time and effort into each one, and their lives were wasted. I hate that more than anything and it still makes me upset,” he said.

Everyone showered him with comments of support and sympathy.

Remember in Chapter 5 when I was drowning in hardboiled eggs? A member had the same problem. Her post got 282 comments. Granted, many of the comments were jokes about a Papa Roach song. Someone wrote, “Cut them into pieces and throw them in a salad.” The next comments were: “Cut my egg into pieces / This is my chef salad / Starvation, no eating / Don’t really care if I cut my hand peeling.” I love the Internet.

There were so many good ideas. Ramen noodles, egg curry, tuna salad, chef salad, pasta salad, potato salad, potato soup, gribiche sauce, Korean mayak, creamed on toast, Scotch eggs, pudding (blend eggs with milk, sugar, and flavoring), tiger skin eggs, son- in-law eggs, pickled eggs or pickled beet eggs on sandwiches, salads, and avocado toast. I am going to try all of these ideas.

Plus, some British guy said he drops whole pickled eggs in a bag of potato chips and shakes them up. Someone wrote, “This is just crazy enough to be absolutely delicious.”

Turns out, there are lots of fellow food waste warriors out there. I just had to look for them.

Earth Day is April 22, National Food Waste Day is April 24, and we'd like the r/noscrapleftbehind community to celebrate with some kind of event, contest, activity, campaign, challenge, game, or quest. Do you have any ideas?

For those that don’t know ‘Waste Not’ is a weekly column in the UK Saturday Guardian newspaper (available online and in app).

In the past there has been some great recipes including a watermelon rind chutney and banana curd.

I’ll be trying this recipe for meatless meatballs this week as I have large end of a white loaf getting steadily harder.

I highly recommend you guys checking the column out for more ideas. https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/apr/13/how-to-turn-stale-bread-into-vegetarian-meatballs-recipe-zero-waste-cooking-tom-hunt?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Edited: to add link

I found these long forgotten chillies at home. Is it possible to turn these into chilli jam? If no, what are your suggestions for using them up if i am not a fan of very spicy food ( but mild spice is ok with me)?