Prue’s WAR ON WASTE
Tired of throwing food away? Bake Off’s Prue Leith and Dr Rupy Aujla come to the rescue in an inspiring new cookery show
Here in Ireland, every household is responsible for 117kgs of food waste per year. That adds up to between ¤400 and ¤1,000 in the bin in every home.
But help is at hand. Bake Off judge Prue Leith and Dr Rupy Aujla, host of hit YouTube show and bestselling book series The Doctor’s Kitchen, aim to transform our cooking and shopping habits and save us money in new Channel 4 series Cook Clever, Waste Less With Prue & Rupy.
Dr Rupy, 36, is a GP who started The Doctor’s Kitchen in 2015 as a way of teaching us how to cook our way to better health. As well as judging Bake Off, Prue, 81, is also known as the Leftover Queen because she hates throwing anything away. ‘They do call me that,’ she laughs. ‘People often say to my husband, “You must be so lucky” and he says, “Well, I live on leftovers”, because he’s a bit rude. He does sometimes follow it up by saying he’s hardly ever had the same thing twice and it’s always delicious, but by then it’s too late! I always remind him the leftovers started as primary ingredients though.’
In the show Prue and Rupy try to help families tackle their food waste and reduce their shopping bills. They devise meal plans and rustle up healthy new recipes using up food that would have been thrown away normally. ‘It really is possible to waste less, save money, eat better and improve your health,’ says Dr Rupy. Here they show you how you can do it too… ‘We’ve saved every family on the show a minimum of ¤1,000 a year, and some of them save multiples of that,’ says Rupy. ‘The question I always ask is, “What are you going to do with this extra money? Just think about that as your motivating factor.” And honestly, this will encourage you to meal-plan. I mass-cook food and then freeze half of it, while the rest will last for at least three or four days.’
Prue and Rupy meet busy doctors Preeti and Sanjeev Arora-Anand who are struggling to juggle their hectic work lives and the multiple meal demands of their three children. To keep everyone happy, they end up cooking three different meals a night. Prue and Rupy create a cunning plan full of delicious dishes to tickle everyone’s taste buds, including a super-simple chicken and cauliflower traybake (above right).
‘If you’re not a confident cook or a food-waste warrior, choose one meal at a time and make it simple,’ says Rupy.
‘Like a one-pan meal you can knock together with a few staples, and practise that every week.
‘To go one step further, make sure the meal has a leftover element. So if you’re making a roast dinner, for example, you can turn the extra roast vegetables into a salad the next day by just throwing some leaves in it, maybe adding some toasted sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds, and then all of a sudden you’ve created another meal.’