Waste not, want not
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Iam, statistically speaking, fairly average. I’m middle-aged, married with two kids, a dog and too many cats. Our family is neither rich nor poor, our politics neither virulently right wing nor bleedingly liberal. We have no religious affiliation; the Lord might give us our daily bread but I’m ashamed to admit that most of it goes mouldy on the bench.
We’re an average New Zealand family, and the average New Zealand family buys more bread than it eats. According to the dumpster-diving statisticians at Love Food Hate Waste – a new initiative from the waste management industry in partnership with councils and community groups – of the 122,547 tonnes of food we biff out every year, more than 10 per cent is stale bread.
Just think how many croutons we could make, and how much money we could save ($51 million, plus hair perms) if we ate all our crusts instead of consigning them to the tip or, in my case, kunekune composters.
This wanton wastefulness would make our Depression-era ancestors turn in their graves, except they can’t because, thrifty til the last, they’re buried in cheaper double-decker plots to save space in the cemetery.
My paternal grandparents were professional penny pinchers who saved most of their pensions.
Both lived well into their 90s, at which point they decided to loosen their purse strings a little.
How we laughed at their newfound profligacy, which extended only to buying tomatoes in winter — and then enjoying an extra pickled onion with some cheese each night.
My maternal grandparents were similarly thrifty. Nothing went to waste on the family farm. When granddad killed a sheep, Mum and her five siblings ate mutton every night for a week.
The fat was drained from the roasting dish into an enamel basin and spread on jam sandwiches in place of butter.
There was liver and bacon for breakfast, tongue in aspic for lunch and, by the end of the week, when everyone was sick of cold cuts, shepherd’s pie and rissoles. (Love Food Hate Waste campaigners would approve, as uneaten leftovers come a close second to bread in our garbage bins.)
If it will fit, the best place to store fresh bread is in your freezer, but our freezer is full of rotten bananas (sixth on the hit list). I buy a bunch of bananas every week because they’re the one fruit my kids will always eat, except when they won’t, at which point I make them eat banana cake instead.
As for banana peels? Steep them in a bottle of warm water for a few days to make liquid fertiliser for your houseplants, or try this canny cake recipe from Love Food Hate Waste.
Preheat your oven to 190C and grease a 20cm cake tin. Pulverise half a dozen banana peels with half a cup of water in a food processor until mushy. Set aside. Separate four eggs. In a large bowl, cream 75 grams softened butter with 2.5 cups sugar, then beat in egg yolks, one at a time. Mix in banana peel puree, 3 cups flour and 2 tablespoons baking powder. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until frothy, then fold gently into the batter. Spoon into the greased tin and bake for 45 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean. It goes without saying that you can freeze any uneaten cake.
Early settlers were the grand dames of domestic frugality, and none more so than my sister’s husband’s grandmother, Muriel, who conned her kids into clearing their dinner plates on a promise of fairy pears and custard for pudding.
Peeled and sliced into crescents then poached in a sugar syrup with a dash of red food colouring, Muriel’s fairy pears were actually chokos.
Chokos, for the uninitiated, rival kale for palatability. They resemble anaemic, constipated avocados and taste like, well, nothing at all.
On the plus side, that firm, bland, cuckoo-like flesh adopts the flavours of other culinary companions making chokos handy bulking agents in chutneys, curries, beef stews and apple shortcake.
I was given a bag of chokos this week and I’m determined not to waste them, though I’d be lying if I said the chances of my children eating them, willingly or by deception, were any better than average.