There was much angst on the radio this morning about food waste with half of all the food we buy apparently ending up in the bin. We generally do our best to keep our waste to a minimum (even if it sometimes ends up costing more – making a whole batch of coconut macaroons, for instance, to use up a single egg white is probably *not* cost effective, especially when they turn out to be so delicious that you start deliberately looking for recipes using extra egg yolks in order to have more whites to ‘use up’…), plan our meals, not buy too much extra etc. etc. but I tell you, if you want to start throwing tons of food away, there’s nothing like growing your own.
last year’s rather more successful batch
My onions have actually kept pretty well this year – I didn’t bother making a nice plait out of them or anything fancy like that, I just left them in the nets where I’d dried them in the shed. But all good things must come to an end and some of the red ones particularly were beginning to look a little ropey so I gathered them up to make onion marmalade again, about three months later than I ought to have done. Hmm. It’s lucky we had a lot, because some of them were pretty nasty by the time I’d got to them so a good few went to the great compost heap in the sky before I had salvaged enough to use. What with that and the potatoes and everything else that’s been carefully planted and nurtured and coddled and weeded and picked and turned out to be surplus to requirements, it’s not hard to see where that figure of 50% wasted might come from. Perhaps we need a pig?
Meanwhile, the remaining onions have contributed to some lovely marmalade, thanks no doubt to the half a bottle of wine that’s gone into it, making it quite an expensive way to use up a few onions. Still, waste not, want not, eh?
Posted by disgruntled 
