One of the topics I am passionate about is food wastage. In an ideal world we would show respect to our food and have none of it go in the bin.
Recently I was able to team up with Love Food Hate Waste (https://lovefoodhatewaste.co.nz) as part of Wellington on a Plate and hold a cooking demonstration on how to use up some of the most commonly usable but thrown away household food items.
According to the Love Food Hate Waste website: “New Zealanders throw away 122,547 tonnes of food a year. That is equivalent to 213 jumbo jets of food that has to go somewhere to rot, instead of being eaten. All of this food is worth about $872 million each year. That amount of food could feed the population of Dunedin for two years!” That’s only in New Zealand, globally “one third of food produced globally is wasted; that is 1.3 billion tonnes of food that is never eaten.” That to me is just mental and we can all do (and should) do our part by reducing our waste as much as possible. Shared here are some of the recipes that use some of LFHW’s top ten chucked out food items that you can try at home.
- 500g cooked chicken
- 2Tbs Butter
- 4Tbs Flour
- 1 sprig thyme
- 2 bay leaves
- 1 clove
- 1/2C Milk
- 1/2C Chicken stock
- Salt, pepper
- 2 eggs, separated
- 200g cheese
- 1Tbs Parsley
- Reserved egg whites (2)
- 1/2C flour
- 1/2C breadcrumbs
- Heat the milk, chicken stock along with the thyme, bay leaves and clove. Melt the butter, add the flour and cook out until sandy. Strain the milk mix and pour onto the flour butter (roux) in batches, stirring until thickened. Add the cheese and stir until dissolved then add the chopped chicken and parsley, take off the heat and season with salt and pepper then stir in the egg yolks. Cool down on a tray and once cool make into balls and crumb by passing through the flour, then whisked egg whites and the breadcrumbs. Deep fry until golden brown at hot (170C).