We are all guilty of throwing away a considerable amount of food waste on the weekly. We have all faced situations where we have thrown stuff out of the cupboards straight into the trash when if we instead could pre-planned what we needed to get before shopping at the grocery store we would not face this problem so much.

On our other blogs we as ‘The Food Waste Project’ have talked a lot about the negative impact we are having on the world due to our food waste. Lots of facts and figures have been stated but for this blog I am going to keep it very light-hearted giving you readers some quick and easy ideas on what to do with some of your left over food. A lot of the time we have the right intention to put all this food to good use instead of chucking it away. Well here are some ways for you to make yourself feel good about saving food and making some delicious food out of almost nothing!

‘Panzanella’ – Panzanella is a type of salad. It is very simply to make and consists of tomatoes, onions, lettuce and any other bits of vegetables you would find suited for your salad. Panzanella’s main ingredient is bread, as it is a type of bread salad. Stale bread is better for this kind of salad as it needs to be hard, so any bits of stale bread left out in the kitchen top you know what to do with it.

‘Bread Balls’ – another way to make best use to your stale bread is to make bread balls. You can use your stale bread or even stale croissants work well too by throwing it into a bowl of milk to make a more doughy substance then from then on in you can add spices or even cheese then a short time in the oven and you have some delicious bread balls.

‘Hummus’ – going away from bread we have hummus. It’s another easy type of food you can make from leftovers. Whenever you have left over veggies, just add it into a bowl then either blend, mix or mash it together to make a tasty hummus.

There are many other great organisations out there helping combat the problem of food waste. One of my favorite which I would recommend all of you readers to check out would be ‘Taste Before You Waste’ which is a well-known Amsterdam organisation, its strategies to help combat the waste is by using free food markets, weekly dinners, and food-saving workshops. Some of the produce that gets rescued from local supermarkets also makes its way back to the Amsterdam University College Dorms, where students can conveniently find free food as they return from their afternoon classes. I think other organisations should draw inspiration from what ‘Taste Before You Waste’ are doing as in the Dutch community it seems like they are really making a big difference.

I hope you put some of these recipes to good use. If there is any confusion about how to make any of these recipes then more detailed instructions can be found online. Thanks again for reading and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @TFWProject.