The Thrifty Cookbook

Book excerpt: This book is not about buying fresh, organic, sustainable, free-range ingredients. It is not about creating picture-perfect dishes or even super-healthy ones. It is not about wowing guests with slick menus and asymmetric flower arrangements. It's about the bit that comes afterwards, the bit about eating it all up. We Britons throw away 6.7 million tons of food a year - that's a third of all the food we buy, and a fifth of our total domestic waste. And about half of it could be eaten. Imagine saving several hundred pounds every year (about £20,000 over a lifetime) and creating a carbon saving equivalent to taking a fifth of all cars off the road. Amazingly, we could do both simply by eating up our leftovers instead of consigning them to methane-belching landfills. The French know how to do it, and our grandparents did too. In this timely and much-anticipated book, acclaimed writer and journalist Kate Colquhoun explains how to make the most of our food. Included are recipes for meat balls and fish cakes, simple stocks and soups, inventive rice and pasta dishes, and great British pies and pickles, as well as sensible ideas for spare egg yolks and whites, wrinkly fruit and veg, and stale bread and cakes. Kate tackles frequently asked questions such as whether it is OK to reheat rice and how much mould we can scrape off the jam, and shows how some well-chosen store cupboard basics can transform any leftover carrot or bacon rind into a satisfying meal. She also takes us on a weekly shop that steers clear of the misleading BOGOFs and ready meals that are the cause of so much of our national waste. Stylishly packaged and printed on 100% recycled paper, The Thrifty Cookbook will reconnect us with our kitchen, leaving us with more time on our hands, more cash in our pockets and more space in our fridges - not to mention a great big environmental brownie point.