Wasted food is money thrown away. There are three things I use almost daily that make wasting food more difficult:
Hand blender
With the ability to mush up food comes the power to turn leftovers into deliciousness. Roast extra veg and just add water before you whizz it up into amazing soup. Brown bananas make the healthiest ice cream and smoothies don’t mind mushy fruit.
I have the same Braun hand blender for the last 25 years and it has made everything from soups to peanut butter for me. I’ve also got a more expensive Nutri Blitzer blender and I don’t think there is much in it. The hand blender is just as good as the cheaper bullets so unless you can spend a lot of money on Nutribullet then go for a hand one. The only thing the Blitzer is better at is making kale smoothies and there is a limited amount of them you need in your life. Check the wattage before you buy – bigger is more powerful. Give your hand blender a longer life by resting it between difficult jobs, it will make peanut butter from a bag of value peanuts but do it in stages.
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Add a load of veg, water and a stock cube to a slow cooker in the morning and you have soup by lunchtime. Great for cooking up big batches of tomato sauce or apple puree, the slow cooker has saved me time and money over the years. Because people think they are complicated to use (they are not) you often see slow cookers in charity shops. They range from cheap and cheerful to more expensive with timers but all you really need them to do is heat up a bowl and cook slowly. I like my slow cooker to have a glass lid so I can see what is happening in it. If you turn the lid upside down and add a jam jar with a spoonful of live yoghurt and some milk you get more yoghurt. Avoid putting cold water into the hot ceramic bowl and your slow cooker will last longer.
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Making double portions and freezing one of them makes life easier when it comes to meal planning. You can make life even easier with a glass container. Mine came from Asda and were a few quid each. Ikea sells similar ones and they are available in most supermarkets as well as online. Mine have snap on plastic lids that I remove before they go into the oven to reheat. I usually don’t bother to defrost first. Some of these are microwave proof if you have one, we don’t, not since the exploding egg and sparks incident!
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