Tips for Making the Most of Your Ingredients—and More Delicious Food, to Boot

Plus recipes for fruit scrap syrup, carrot top pesto, and garlic braised greens

Make your cooking more creative and your resources more effective by minimizing food waste in your kitchen. (Slawomir Fajer/Shutterstock)

There was a time when every scrap counted, and nothing went to waste. During the Great Depression and both World Wars, food was scarce and prized. Families learned to make do with less and make the most of what they had.

Stale bread became breadcrumbs and bulked up meatloaf, sausages, and meatballs. Thrifty home keepers transformed vegetable peels and spent bones into luxurious broths. A skilled cook might turn fruit scraps into jellies, syrups, or vinegar. Just about everything went to good use, and what was leftover went to the backyard chickens, which in turn provided plenty of eggs.

Yet with time, these skills faded. The abundance that characterized the latter half of the 20th century meant plenty of resources and little need to make every bit stretch. Convenience, rather than thrift, guided decision making. With that newfound convenience, food waste skyrocketed, with some estimates suggesting a 50 percent increase since the 1970s.

Wasted Food

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a whopping 133 billion pounds of food goes to waste in the United States in 2010. That accounts for about 40 percent of the total food supply, valued at over $160 billion. While this amounts to a huge waste of resources and labor, it’s particularly troubling when roughly 34 million people in the United States experience food insecurity, and households with children are the hardest hit.

This waste occurs at all levels of the food supply, from the farm to your very own plate. In 2015, growers were forced to dump apples worth a total of $95 million because of labor disputes along West Coast ports. In 2020, dairy farmers faced pandemic-related logistical challenges as well as plummeting prices that forced them to send gallons of milk down the drain. Produce that is misshapen, blemished, or over- or undersized can struggle to find a retail market that values uniformity. Meanwhile, inadequate storage, spillage, and over-ordering exacerbate the problem at the manufacturing and retail levels.

For consumers, food waste is complex. Purchasing too much and not using it quickly enough amounts to much waste. Preference for visually attractive, uniform produce means that food that may be perfectly good to eat but not all that pretty goes to waste, such as green-tinted oranges, bulbous carrots, or tiny apples. Additionally, many people simply don’t know how to choose or prepare a variety of fresh foods, let alone use every scrap.

Thrifty cooking won’t alleviate the rampant, systemic food waste, but it will mean less waste in your kitchen, more delicious food, and wiser use of your own resources. Save leftover chicken bones in the freezer for making broth, toss stale bread in a food processor for breadcrumbs, and make the most of your vegetables by using peels, cores, stems, and all the edible parts.

Stems and Leafy Things

The stems of hardy greens, such as Swiss chard or collards, are delicious when finely chopped and sautéed with plenty of olive oil and garlic or added to a smoothie. Blend herbs, including the stems, or young leafy radish or carrot greens with olive oil and garlic to make pesto.

Beet, turnip, and radish greens work in just about any recipe that calls for kale, spinach, or chard. They’re particularly good chopped fine and added to soup or braised with plenty of garlic, olive oil, and broth.

Mushroom stems are delicious when chopped finely and added to ground meat in meatloaf and burgers, while broccoli stems can be sliced thin and stir-fried or pureed into a soup.

Onion Skins and Vegetable Peels

For most recipes, you don’t need to peel your vegetables. If you do, store the scraps in a resealable bag and toss it in the freezer. When it’s full, consider making a nutrient-rich vegetable stock with them. If you have a dehydrator, you can let them dry until crisp and grind them with a bit of salt to make a vegetable-based seasoning salt.

Pits, Hulls, and Other Fruit Scraps

Many fruits are edible in their entirety, but we eat only a portion. You can put bitter citrus rinds, strawberry hulls, and even stone fruit pits to intelligent use in your kitchen.

The kernels from stone fruit, especially cherries and apricots, are traditionally used to make liqueurs such as noyaux in France or seasonings such as mahleb, which is popular in Greece and Turkey. Citrus peels are delicious when dried and made into a tea or blitzed in a food processor with sugar. Meanwhile, other bits of fresh fruit, such as strawberry hulls, smashed raspberries, or similar fruit scraps, can be macerated in vinegar or simmered with sugar and water to make a fruit syrup.

Carrot Top Pesto

Make a delicious pesto out of carrot tops that can be drizzled over pasta, roasted carrots, or your finger food of choice. (Jennifer McGruther)

Feathery green carrot tops have a flavor reminiscent of parsley, and they make a delicious pesto when you blend them with olive oil, garlic, and walnuts. Swirl it into a steaming bowl of pasta, use it as a dip, or serve it drizzled over roasted carrots.

Makes about 1 cup

• 2 cups coarsely chopped carrot tops
• 1/4 cup walnuts
• 2 medium garlic cloves
• 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1/4 cup finely grated parmesan cheese
• Fine salt, to taste

Toss the carrot tops, walnuts, and garlic into your food processor. Pulse until finely chopped, and then add the oil and parmesan cheese. Process until it forms a uniform sauce, then adjust the seasoning with salt.

Serve immediately or store in a tightly sealed container in the fridge for up to 5 days or in the freezer for up to 3 months.

Fruit Scrap Syrup

This fruit syrup serves as a catch-all for any fruit odds and ends you have in your kitchen, and will liven up anything from a bowl of ice cream to freshly made waffles. (Jennifer McGruther)

Use just about any bit of leftover fruit in this recipe. For citrus, use only the fragrant zest unless you enjoy the bitter notes the white pith delivers. Strawberry hulls work well, as do apple and pear cores and the pits of stone fruit, especially those of cling peaches. The syrup is delicious drizzled over ice cream or homemade yogurt, or poured over waffles and pancakes.

Makes about 2 1/2 cups

• 2 cups fruit scraps
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 cup water

Place the fruit scraps in a small saucepan, and cover with sugar. Add the water, then stir. Warm the saucepan over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally, until it boils and the sugar dissolves completely.

Allow the syrup to cool to room temperature, and then strain it through a fine-mesh sieve. Discard the solids, and store the syrup in a tightly sealed container in the fridge for up to 6 months.

Easy Braised Greens With Garlic

Braise any leftover beet or radish greens with garlic to make a tasty side dish. (Jennifer McGruther)

Any hardy, leafy green vegetable works well in this recipe, and it’s a great way to use up extra beet or radish greens. If you’re using kale, chard, beet, or collards, separate the tough stems from the tender leaves and sauté them with the garlic to ensure they soften a bit before serving.

Serves about 4

• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 3 medium cloves garlic, sliced thin
• 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
• 1 1/2 pounds leafy greens (radish, turnip, beet, etc.)
• 1/2 cup chicken broth or vegetable stock
• 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar

Warm the olive oil in a wide skillet over medium heat, and then stir in the garlic and crushed red pepper. Cook the garlic until fragrant, about 2 minutes, and then toss in the greens until well-coated with olive oil.

Pour in the chicken broth, and let the greens simmer until crisp-tender and most of the liquid has evaporated, about 5 minutes. Sprinkle with vinegar and adjust seasoning with salt, then serve.