No one on the planet feels good about tossing a piece of food they didn’t get to in time. Composting veggies that have lost their will to live is heart-wrenching!
That’s why we wrap food in Abeego reusable food wrap to extend its life and avoid the food waste blues for good. Few things are quite as delightful as unwrapping bright, perky, and delicious food destined for a meal shared with loved ones rather than the compost (and did you know that Abeego actually invented the beeswax concept? So they know a thing or two about making the perfect ones!)
That being said, the compost bin can still pile up faster than we’d like. with what we have been taught are inedible "food scraps" such as beet greens, potato peels, and veggie stalks. Tossing them don’t evoke the same type of guilt when we toss them. As if they’re an inevitable side effect of eating fresh.
What if you could actually save some of these food scraps and create delicious recipes with them?
Think about cauliflowers: they grow with an abundance of leafy greens that are perfectly edible, delicious, and completely ignored. However, the transportation of that very robust head of cauliflower to your grocery store doesn’t allow the leafy greens to stay fresh and beautiful for the same amount of time as the head of the cauliflower. Are cauliflower leaves edible, you ask? Oh yes. Roast them up with salt, pepper & olive oil, and they’re quite simply to die for. Another reason to shop local as much as you can!
Can you imagine the positive impact if we ate all our foods root to stem and head to tail? We would save money, time, and keep delicious, edible foods out of the compost and landfill.
Here below are five of Abeego's team favorite creative ideas & recipes to run a zero-waste kitchen and reap the benefits of eating the whole beast.
PARMESAN RINDS
When you reach the end of your block of Parmigiano-Reggiano, keep the rind!
For a rich & creamy addition of flavour, put it in your simmering pot of tomato soup until it dissolves. If the whole thing doesn’t liquefy, you can then toss what’s left or chop it up if it’s soft enough.
Shop the Abeego cheese wrap.
CARROT TOPS
Those beautiful, bushy, and fragrant tops on your Farmers Market carrots? Yep, they’re totally edible and flavourful. Our favorite recipe for these overlooked greens is this carrot top pesto.
Pesto lover? You can make it with kale stems, too!
Shop the Abeego carrots wrap.
STRAWBERRY TOPS
We’re always looking for ways to incorporate more greens into our diet, so why on earth would we toss these nutritious little strawberry hats?
Pop the whole strawberry in your mouth, or better yet, try Abeego Strawberry Mint Smoothie Recipe.
Shop the Abeego strawberries wrap and fold it into a bag to carry your starwberries!
WATERMELON RINDS
Recipes with watermelon rind? Really? Oh yes!
Think of how much space they take up in your compost bin. This Candied Watermelon Rind recipe (also known as watermelon pickles) is one of the most creative ways to prepare and devour a perfectly edible food we so often toss.
CITRUS PEEL
From yuzu, pomelo, grapefruit & beyond, experiment with citrus varieties for the following recipes!
Lyndsey Eden’s Candied Orange Peel recipe is one for the books and a perfect sweet treat.
Conscious Cleanse’s Blueberry & Lemon Smoothie Recipe uses the whole lemon—peel & all—for an extra burst of nutrients in your morning smoothie.
Shop the Abeego citrus wrap.
The less food we toss, the more we can learn to understand its life cycle. Utilize your vegetable scraps to the fullest and embrace the sweet nuances of broccoli stems, the versatility of radish greens, and then nutrient-rich opportunities of cilantro stems.
This blog originally appeared on the Abeego website.
