Lovely leftovers!

Statistics (from many different sources) show that millions of tonnes of food are wasted every year in the UK alone.  Apart from the shocking environmental impact this has on our fragile planet (for example, see this Guardian report on how much precious water is wasted in the production of food that is then thrown away uneaten), it is also throwing our hard-earned and over-stretched money straight in the bin!

In my parents' day, throwing away any food (following the lean, post-war times of rationing) would have been unthinkable to them ... it would have been an almost unforgivable sin!  They may not have known everything about the "true cost" of food that we are aware of today - poor animal welfare, environmentally-damaging farming practices, unfair trading, etc - but they did know that food was a precious, expensive and limited commodity that was not to be wasted.

Hence, I grew up very much in the knowledge that "leftovers" from a meal were not to be thrown away, but were the makings of another wholesome, tasty meal.  It's a tradition that I, as a person with an environmental conscience, have embraced and improved upon; with a little imagination and some judicious use of herbs, spices and other flavourings, most leftover food can be transformed into the basis of another good plateful of food ... costing next to nothing!

Take our meal last night, for example: pork, gravy and red cabbage from Sunday's roast were re-heated (sliced pork and gravy in the oven, red cabbage in the microwave) as was the cheesy potato bake from Saturday night's meal; everything had been kept covered up, in the fridge, and tasted just as good as the first time around.  I fried together three courgettes and an onion, adding one lonely mushroom a bit later, with just a bit of black pepper ... and hey presto, we had a delicious and substantial meal for the cost of three pieces of veg!  (The small pork joint had only cost £4.00, so made a relatively cheap Sunday roast anyway; but why not get another meal out of it, if you can?  Then the cost per meal, per person, goes down to £1.00!!)

Many people these days seem to think that, in order to "economise" with food, they have to buy cheap food with a dodgy or unknown background; my choice, however, is to buy better quality food with a history that is more acceptable to my principles, and to try not to waste any.

NB  Re-heating leftover food is a perfectly safe practice, provided you follow (strictly) some simple guidelines:

• Once you have served your meal, allow leftovers to cool as quickly as possible (turn off any heat, etc.), keep covered and refrigerate as soon as it is properly cold.
• Do not let cooked food come into contact with raw food in the fridge (this is necessary practice anyway, whether you are re-heating leftovers or not).
• When serving for the second time, either serve cold, or make sure that the food is thoroughly re-heated (ie. piping hot) all the way through.  Serve at once.
• Do not, ever, re-heat food more than once.  Think about this!  This means that, if your original meal was made using ready-cooked ingredients (for example, you heated up a pie that could have been eaten cold, because it was already cooked; or you re-heated a ready-cooked chicken) then you have already re-heated it once.  You can NOT, therefore, re-heat it again.  Re-heating is ONLY safe when you made the original dish from raw.  This also applies to cooked, frozen food (prawns, for example): you can use them in a hot dish, but must not re-heat the dish later, as this would be heating them for a third time.

Don't be scared off by these rules; as long as you get the one-time-only rule into your head, you can't go wrong (ie. cook from raw only once; re-heat from cooked only once).  The same rule, incidentally, applies to freezing (ie. freeze raw only once; freeze cooked only once).  And remember that this applies no matter who has done the cooking and/or freezing - yourself, the product supplier or the supermarket!

Learning to be "food aware" is, in my opinion, our duty.  It gives us more responsibility for what we consume, but also liberates us and opens up a whole world of new possibilities.