Clever ways to use your food scraps

We all have food scraps at home, and if you aren’t living in a council that has organic bins, it can feel extremely wasteful to simply throw them in the bin.

Luckily, there are some clever ways that you can reuse food scraps, making your contribution to landfill much lower and saving some money in the process.

Here are some tips on how to reuse food scraps at home:

• Bones – these can be simmered for a certain amount of time to create soup stocks and broths packed with nutrients, minerals, protein, calcium and amino acids.
• Bread crusts – store in the freezer until you have about 15 slices. Then, thaw them out and cook them in the oven to make either croutons or breadcrumbs.
• Herbs – if you have bought a bunch of a certain herb but only require a small amount, don’t throw the rest away. Mince them up, mix with olive oil and freeze in ice cube trays to be used in recipes at a later date.
• Bananas – if you have overripe bananas but no time to make banana bread, simply peel them, freeze and then dip into chocolate for a delicious treat.
• Eggshells – grind in a blender and add to potting soil, or sprinkle directly on your garden. If you have chickens or pet birds, you can roast eggshells in the oven to kill the bacteria, grind, and feed to them as a supplement.
• Old vegetables and veggie scraps – if you have some vegetables that are not quite fresh anymore but aren’t at the mouldy stage, chop them all up, boil them and process into a vegetable stock that can be kept in the fridge or frozen in ice cube trays. You can also use peels, skins, stems and leaves of most vegetables for this purpose.
• Peel – make your own flavoured tea using peel from things such as ginger, oranges, apples or banana. Add them to boiling water with a little honey to sweeten and let it infuse for a delicious drink. Another use for peels such as lemon, lime and orange is to place them in a jar and cover completely with vinegar. After about two weeks, strain the peels and transfer the liquid to a spray bottle and you have an all-natural, all-purpose cleaner.
• Wine – if you have wine that has gone bad, simply use it in cooking instead of pouring it down the sink.