Weblog
A daily blog written by food instructor, cook and local chef Andrea Hosfeld with recipes, kitchen tips, and everyday inspiration in the battle to waste less food and live and eat better.
Please send your comments or questions to: andreahosfeld@gmail.com
Despite the mild weather Christmas is here again. I may be walking my dog without a coat and harvesting those last few peppers in my greenhouse, but there’s no denying the jolly season is back. The Christmas lights are on in Teddington, Twickenham and Hampton Hill. I can’t even complain that all of this is happening too early because my own beloved American Thanksgiving has also past, the date which makes cheesy music and little plastic Santas officially allowable.
There is nothing that brings out excess like Christmas. We buy too many presents, drink too much mulled wine, fight too much with our relatives, and gobble festive food like we’re eating for England. It’s the time of year that we’re meant to be joyful. The excess, we hope, is a sign that our lives are full. After all, how else will we get through grim January and February unless we’ve fattened ourselves with indulgence.
The economic situation, however, has cast a bit of a grey cloud over this year’s yuletide celebrations. Every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to be preaching doom and gloom: lost jobs, no growth, shops closing, high streets shutting down, the end of society as we know it... And it is for this reason that I stay away from the news (to the extent that I can). The negativity over time starts to feel like a disease in and of itself, and my life is too important for me to buy into the notion that nothing I do matters.
This week I’ve been imploring you to cook with your leftovers, get creative in the kitchen, share your food, get intimate with your fridge, plan your dinners, and stop letting the supermarkets dictate what you buy.
But why? Does it really matter?
One man I spoke to about how much food householders are wasting told me restaurants waste more. This seems to be a common copout. Point the finger somewhere else. Make it somebody else’s problem. The truth is there are already enough things in the universe that we can’t change. This isn’t one of them. It is totally within our power to waste less food, to plan better, to eat better, to live better.
Apathy is a giving up and a giving in to the things in life that seem too big to comprehend, too large to combat.
Change begins with you.
So, while you’re shopping for your Christmas turkey with all the trimmings and stocking your cupboard for the influx of relatives, keep an eye out for what you can do differently this year. How much meat do you really need? How many sprouts make up one portion? Use your turkey carcass for soup on Boxing Day. Make a savoury bread pudding with your leftover bread.
And perhaps, if you are feeling really inspired, you might make an official resolution on January 1st to appreciate the plenty in your life by wasting less of what you already have.
Good Luck!
A daily blog written by food instructor, cook and local chef Andrea Hosfeld with recipes, kitchen tips, and everyday inspiration in the battle to waste less food and live and eat better.
Please send your comments or questions to: andreahosfeld@gmail.com
I do the children’s story hour at Langton’s Bookshop every Friday. Sitting in a wicker chair by a stand of fairytale puppets, I am surrounded by a chatty group of three and four year olds who always seem to add a bit of perspective to my life. By coming to story hour these kids are not only getting invited into the world of books, they are also learning how to sit still and pay attention. Kids this age are learning all sorts of social skills. Last week I noticed one of the boys was breaking off pieces of his granola bar and passing it to the boy sitting next to him. It got me thinking about what I learned when I was four. Now Andrea, said my parents and relatives and teachers, you must learn how to share.
Sometimes no matter how hard we try to buy the right amount of food or prepare enough dinner so everyone will have just enough, we still end up buying or making too much. We are human after all, and I suspect that behind this excess buying there is really a desire to make sure everyone has had their needs met, to please and pamper our families and friends. But why stop there? Why waste food when you could share it? I’ll show you what I mean...
Last night I went into a bit of a panic. I have been charged with inspiring people to waste less food and yet at the moment my fridge has quite a few cooking demo leftovers that need to be used up before the Saturday demo at the Richmond Farmer’s market. So, this morning I got up and put them all in a bowl. I dumped in the shredded red cabbage, the shredded white cabbage, the shredded carrots, and a few tablespoons of toasted sesame seeds. I chopped up the bunch of spring onions whose green tops are starting to wilt. I have hummus in the fridge which I made on Saturday and I don’t like to keep it for more than a week. Luckily my Israeli father-in-law, who makes the tastiest salads whenever we come to dinner, has taught me a fabulous trick. You take the hummus and add a little water and olive oil. I like to add in some lemon juice, and lemon zest and tahini as well but watering down the hummus is all that really needs to be done. Now this dressing can be added to the vegetables making a gorgeous salad.
Knowing that my husband and I could not consume all of this salad ourselves, I loaded my middle eastern style coleslaw into a Tupperware and sent it into my husband’s work where I have no doubt that it will be devoured.
Sharing is something that we don’t usually think about in this crusade to waste less. Perhaps it is because we’ve become a bit sealed off in London. We forget that food is a gift that can bring communities and people together. During the Great British Bake Off this summer, I was smitten by cake. I couldn’t stay out of my kitchen. One of my friends joked that the oven was always on in my flat. He wasn’t far from the truth. The problem was my husband and I could only eat so much cake. I live in a Victorian conversion with seven flats so one night I took to the stairs and knocked on doors, giving out Tiramisu cupcakes. I had 24 that needed to find a better home. My neighbours, who I see once every couple of weeks, were surprised to hear my knock. They sniffed at the cupcakes with suspicion as if I might be one of those odd American serial killers come to poison them with kindness. The next day, however, empty plates were returned to me with big smiles.
So the next time you buy a Victoria sponge from Marks and Spencers that you aren’t sure you can finish, or you have half of a vegetable lasagne that you know you won’t finish in time, try bringing it into work or offering it to the elderly couple that live next door and are watching their pennies. You might just spread a little kindness and get rid of waste at the same time.
A daily blog written by food instructor, cook and local chef Andrea Hosfeld with recipes, kitchen tips, and everyday inspiration in the battle to waste less food and live and eat better.
Please send your comments or questions to: andreahosfeld@gmail.com
At the weekend a friend of mine told me her mother had cracked the food waste problem years ago when she was a kid. At the end of the week when the family gathered round the table with the weight of a week’s worries just beginning to lift, they were served a heaping bowl of Friday soup. What was in it? Who knew. Perhaps a foodie would be able to tease out the subtle flavours. Certainly the roasted chicken carcass had been put to good use, as had all the leftovers in the fridge, and some unused vegetables at the bottom of the drawer. You’ll never eat this again, she told her kids, and she was right. Every Friday was a once in a lifetime experience.
It’s amazing what I discover in my kitchen when I allow myself to throw caution to the wind. Today, for example I had a look at the fresh coriander which I have been using in cooking demos since Saturday. It was still looking green but a leaf or two had taken on a yellow hue and I feared it wasn’t long before some of the leaves started went shiny and black.
So right there and then I decided to make a pesto even though coriander isn’t my usual herb of choice. Normally I’d use fresh basil and pine nuts, neither of which are currently in my flat. I have a stick blender that I swear by so I bunged all the coriander leaves into the plastic measuring container. I turned around to throw away the stalks in the food waste bin and something made me stop. Perhaps it was the result of a week spent thinking about waste. What the hell, I thought, I’ll chop up the stalks as well and throw them in. I mashed a clove of garlic with some sea salt and scraped it into the container, glugged some olive oil over the top, and threw in a few walnuts. The garlic made me think of hummus which made me remember the bag of lemon halves in the fridge leftover from one of my cooking classes at Waldegrave. I squeezed them in too.
And then I blended it all up.
Dear reader, would I be tooting my own horn to say that what I produced was absolute magic. I want to smother everything I eat in this sauce, astonishing since I could just as easily have let the coriander go off. Now I have something to brush onto fish or mix with mayonnaise in a salad. I have a great condiment for curry and rice, a sandwich spread, and something to add to hummus when it needs a good lift. I’ve put it in the freezer until I’m ready to decide what food needs a pesto blessing.
These sorts of successes in the kitchen are the result of letting ourselves play, and the food isn’t the only prize, it’s the process of creating that we learn to love as well. Maybe we all need a special day like my friend’s mother, a day that you haven’t been asked to cook under duress. Friday soup was made, not surprisingly, on a day that just screams put your slippers on and relax because tomorrow you can sleep in. When do you have space to play in the kitchen, a day to create something memorable while you are cleaning out your fridge?
And while we are creating a day, perhaps it wouldn’t be bad to have a few dishes to help us along the way. Soup isn’t the only thing that is born of an untidy fridge. One of my personal favourites is Thai Red Curry which I will post today as well. It is one of the quickest meals to throw together and if you have leftovers, it is an absolute pleasure as you cut out most of the steps. This particular curry is vegetarian but feel free to throw in meat as well. Like all good recipes, it relies on good ingredients so if you have the time, swing by Paya Thai Asian Supermarket, just off the roundabout near Richmond station on the road heading to Kew. They sell a fantastic red curry paste called Namjai and you can pick up a small bag of frozen kaffir lime leaves for 50p. The curry paste is potent stuff so you only need 2-3 teaspoons for a pretty flavourful curry. If you are using the supermarket variety you may have to use a whole jar. The rest of the ingredients in the curry are up to you. I’ve used green beans, potatoes, red peppers and onions but maybe you have some leftover boiled parsnips that are just crying out to be drowned in coconut milk... give it a whirl.
And in the spirit of sharing I will offer you the chilli recipe I have been honing since my birth. It had to be altered slightly when I became a vegetarian but I don’t think it suffered very much in the transition. This recipe is strong enough to take a whole lot of experimenting. Maybe initially you could keep in the secret ingredients which are smoked paprika, onions and red peppers but after you’ve got the knack you’ll be telling me your chilli is better, asking me if I ever considered the virtues of sundried tomatoes.
Plan a Friday of anything goes into your week!
