The Green Guide: Tip NO.2 – In The Kitchen

Tips and tricks for making environmentally friendly swaps today!

These tips cover changes you can when cooking and preparing food at home which are less damaging to the planet while making time in the kitchen more productive and fun! 🍰

• The main goal in the kitchen is to prevent as much food and packaging waste as possible. The first thing to do when starting to use our food more efficiently is to look at our food in a more creative way. Ingredients can be used in so many ways and can be recycled to produce even more delicious dishes than first meet the eye. Say you have a roast chicken on Sunday, come Monday you can use the leftovers from your roast in a casserole, using the chicken, vegetables and stock. Then for Tuesday lunch, you can have a portion of casserole, already prepared. So just in this example we have managed to make one dish stretch to cover meals in three days. This is by no means a new idea, but one that when implemented in our lives can make meal preparation easier and more economical. Freezing spare ingredients and meals, for instance when batch cooking, can also help reduce waste and take some of the stress out of meal preparation.
• Another creative solution is to embrace cooking! As soon as you are willing to get involved with making your meals and form an attachment with where your food comes from, it becomes easier to cook with ingredients you have at home, using your own recipe ‘toolkit’ instead of resorting to supermarket ready made. Knowing a few key recipes that you like and learning to cook with what you’ve got at home helps prevent waste by using what you already have without buying more.

• The power of vegetables! Now, I know there is a lot of talk around sustainability, vegetarianism and veganism, but what I want to focus on is the variety and use of vegetables in cooking. Vegetables encompass so many different types and flavours that they can make great meals as the stand out flavour all by themselves. From just adding a fresh pepper to a pasta sauce to channelling your inner MasterChef and making a vegetable curry or chilli, vegetables can be an addition to so many of your staple recipes. You don’t have to give up meat overnight to make a change, just shifting your mindset to knowing that you don’t have to eat meat with every meal can open up so many cooking opportunities. You could try vegetarian options at lunchtime, try buying British or local meat only, designate meat-free days in your household or just try to use meat more effectively such as in the roast example at the beginning of this post. You may find that not eating meat as often isn’t as limiting as once thought now there are so many great meat-free recipes out there.
• As a more natural approach to cooking, trying to use seasonal ingredients in your recipes can help to lessen the environmental impact by reducing food miles and supporting local producers. This may be by choosing meat, fruit and vegetables in season in the supermarket, or choosing to buy through a farm shop or straight from the supplier. Though the latter may not be accessible for everyone, being able to spot on the supermarket labels when something has been grown in Britain is a great start to eating more consciously.

• We all love a sweet treat with a cuppa come snack time, so why buy when you can bake? Cakes and treats from the supermarket are often highly packaged, ingredient intensive and unhealthy. While home baking still isn’t top of the health list, you can control what goes into your bakes and how much you want to make, leading to more conscious and healthy decisions. Like cooking, get creative with your bakes to use up ingredients around your home. These cupcakes (picture above) used a spare apple and store cupboard ingredients to make really yummy cakes that you can share with family and friends. Once you start to take back some of the control in the kitchen, sustainable changes will come to you when you start to understand what food you use and where it is wasted. Bake Off who?

• In regards to packaging, food items can produce a lot of waste, including plastic pollution. A starting point may be taking your own vegetable/mesh bags when you go shopping so that you can just pick the loose produce you need. Some shops also allow you to bring your own containers when buying meat from the fresh counters such as meat or fish. Another step is to recycle as much as the packaging as possible, and if difficult to in your area, check whether it can be recycled through Terracycle, who try to recycle any kind of waste. Some brands show the Terracycle symbol on their packaging, so then all you need to do is send the waste to your local drop-off location.

That was Tip No.2, which hopefully gave you something to consider when you’re busy cooking up something delicious at home or baking a tasty treat that will help you connect what you eat to its impact on our planet.