With two kids under four years old in the family, we go through a lot of food on a weekly basis. It also means we always have leftovers because with kids, in my experience, we just never know how much they will eat at each time. While 8.4 million families in the UK struggle to put food on the table, 7.3 million tonnes of food waste end up in landfills each year. It is a shocking amount and while there are so many other factors I can’t control, adjusting our lifestyle over the past few years has helped us to reduce our food waste significantly. This is due to some tricks that can be easily adopted in any household, big or small.
Batch cooking not only saves energy, time and money but it helps food waste. I love making a veggie sauce once a month with loads of fresh and dry ingredients, like courgettes, carrots, lentils, beans or chickpeas. One big portion to be served on the day, another into the fridge for next day and the rest into the freezer. This sauce is perfect to act as vegetarian shepherd’s pie just by adding mash, as spag bol with pasta or just mixed in with plain rice.