How to Create 5-Star Meals out of Leftover Scraps
Here is a great way to practice healthy eating and be environmentally conscious at the same time. This article from Epicurious teaches us How to Cook With Food You'd Normally Throw Away. We all know that there is so much food that is wasted in our kitchens. You might not even think twice about it sometimes. Like when you throw away the beet greens from your beets, or toss out the pulp from after making vegetable juice. Maybe you have wondered if there was something that you could do with all this refuse that is just going into your garbage can, and there actually are some amazingly creative uses for many of these food items. If you don't use your kitchen scraps for a baking or cooking recipe, then it also is great to start a compost bin in your yard, especially if you garden. You can throw all plant matter into the compost bin when you are cleaning up your kitchen, and over time the organic matter in the compost bin will begin to decompose and create soil that is very fertile and great to use in the garden. So composting is a wonderful way to use your kitchen scraps and keep them out of the landfill.
The thing is that in our world people create a lot of waste. Think of how much you throw away weekly and then multiply that by a few billion. Granted, there are more and more people beginning to realize the impact that landfills have on our Earth, so there is quite a bit more awareness than even 20 or 30 years ago in that regard. People are tending to recycle more, and more people are even getting into growing their own vegetable gardens and living simpler lives. Recycling our plastics and glass is a great way to keep loads of stuff out of the landfills. Now, we have awesome recycling bins that we just leave outside of our house and a service that comes to pick it all up, sometimes even composting bins as well. So this makes it easier than ever to be environmentally friendly.
Another way that you can use your waste is of course in a cooking recipe and when making some simple healthy recipes. This list of recipe ideas from Epicurious has some awesome food ideas and recipes when it comes to cooking with food you might normally throw away. Actually, a restaurant owner decided to tackle this common problem head on by shutting down his successful restaurant in order to start up a new one that made use of the local farmers and farmer's market's scraps by making them into awesome recipes that people could enjoy. Dan Barber is the owner of WastED, a restaurant in New York, which is just on trial for the time being, but is very popular so far. Dan uses anything and everything he can get from juice pulp that is left over from making juices, to leftover champagne. He creates amazing recipes from these food items and is making a difference in the way we view food scraps. It goes back to the way out grandparents may have been, having intentions to use everything, a waste not kind of attitude. Dan teaches us how we can use things like broccoli and cauliflower stems to make a salad or some saut�ed veggie recipes. You can also use champagne that has gone flat to make a syrup recipe for desserts and drinks. How awesome is that?
Thank you to David Tamarkin from Epicurious, and Dan Barber for inspiring us all with this awesome article on How to Cook With Food You'd Normally Throw Away. Epicurious is a haven for awesome recipes, you can find dessert recipes, dinner recipes, appetizer recipes and so many simple healthy recipes on this site.*
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