Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

My desperate attempts to minimise food wastage are often confounded by my inability to pass up a bargain.

$12 for a 2½ kg box of glacé pears? Normally $20 a kilo? Yep, I’ll take them…

Huge fish heads for $5 a kilo? Don’t throw them out, give me all of them…

Free range chicken carcasses for $1 each? I’m sure I can find room for those…

Sigh.

As a result, I usually have two bulging freezers and a fridge full of supplies that need to be used up. Here are some of our recent emptying-the-fridge/freezer/pantry meals.

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Last week, our friend Johnny passed me a bag of Italian prosciutto offcuts, and the lovely Dot gave me a wedge of very ripe Brie and a ball of mozzarella…

Before heading off to the wedding last weekend, I’d baked a double batch of sourdough for the boys. As they only ate one loaf, there was quite a lot of stale bread leftover when we got home…

I turned it all – bread, prosciutto, cheeses and some semi-dried tomatoes – into savoury slices. One for Johnny, one for Dot, one for Luca around the corner who’s in the middle of exams, and one for Big Boy’s lunch.

They’re a doddle to assemble (basic instructions are here) and infinitely adaptable – I skipped the cream this time and used just milk and eggs. Any cured meats, cheeses and antipasti you have in the fridge can go in. My friend Patrick describes this as mac’n’cheese with bread instead of mac; Johnny calls it “bread’n’boc(concini) pudding”.

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The fish heads were all scaled, de-gilled, vacuum sealed and frozen. As I’m the only person in the house who will eat them, I defrost one every couple of weeks and microwave it, topped with a little jarred black bean sauce, scallions and ginger. It’s ludicrously easy to cook (thanks Auntie Sim!) and I love having one all to myself for dinner…

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A recent freezer excavation turned up 300g of chicken mince and two half packets of dumpling wrappers (they defrost well, so it’s always worth freezing leftover skins).

These became an easy dinner one night…

…and dumpling noodle soup the next, with the addition of noodles and some defrosted homemade stock. I’m always happiest when I have a large stash of stock in the freezer, and the pressure cooker makes that easy…

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During International Scone Week, I baked buttermilk scones for Small Man (they’re his favourite). He was out during the day and only managed to eat a couple, so that night, I broke them up and used them to top a mixed berry crumble. I routinely freeze leftover cake or brioche or cookies to throw onto defrosted fruit for an instant dessert…

Here’s an earlier one we made with leftover tea cake and frozen blueberries…

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Finally, I made fruit and nut cakes with the glacé pears…

We usually make this simple recipe at Christmas, but it’s good eating at any time of the year, with the added bonus of being both gluten and dairy free. It was also a great way to use up all those nearly empty packets of nuts in the back fridge!

Here’s the basic formula…

• 250g seedless dates
• 350g mixed glacé fruit, cut into pieces (cherries, mixed peel, apricots, pears etc)
• 80g raisins
• 450g mixed unsalted nuts (works best if you can include brazil nuts in the mix)
• 100g ground almonds
• ½ teaspoon baking powder
• 3 large (59g) eggs
• 2 tablespoons (40ml) honey
• 1 teaspoon homemade vanilla extract
• 2 tablespoons rum

Instructions, with photos, are here. I baked the cakes in lined loaf tins for an hour at 150C with fan, then allowed them to cool slowly, doused in rum and wrapped in foil and a tea towel. They keep for ages and slice well if stored in the fridge…

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Are you good at resisting a bargain? And what clever recipes do you have to use up your leftover bits and pieces?

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I’ve been baking like a crazy woman lately.

I enjoy the process enormously (obviously!) and it’s a very affordable form of therapy – four kilos of sourdough costs me just $2 in flour. There’s always plenty to share – for example, of the batch above, the loaves and most of the focaccia went to Mum’s neighbours.

No matter how much I give away though, there always seems to be old bread leftover in our kitchen. Lovely Clare asked me recently what I did with it all. The answer is that most of it gets dried – my boys have a great love for “crunchy bread” and snack on it like crisps.

My drying procedure is to slice up stale sourdough and bake it on parchment-lined trays in a 100C oven (non fan forced) for two to three hours. Often I’ll set the timer and go to bed, and Big Boy will turn the heat off for me when it’s ready. The bread then stays in the oven until the following morning. And in case you’re wondering, my electrical engineer husband assures me that this is quite an economical use of the oven (particularly in winter, when it helps to heat the kitchen and dining room as well).

The little baguette crisps are perfect for topping with paté or tapenade. Dried focaccia tends to taste fried because of the higher oil content, and both my sons find it irresistible. Any excess dried bread is blitzed in the food processor to form fine bread crumbs, which are then used to coat flathead fillets on fish and chip nights.

Last night, a handful of the breadcrumbs went into meatballs – these were baked in a chipotle chilli and tomato sauce until tender, then sandwiched in sourdough baguettes with wilted spinach and provolone cheese. After assembling, the rolls were wrapped in foil and heated in the oven to melt the cheese and toast the baguettes. With the addition of another 1998 shiraz uncovered in the recent cellar tidy up, we feasted like royalty!

Dried bread is now as much a staple in our house as fresh sourdough. As long as the slices are bone dry, they’ll store for ages in airtight containers, providing a wonderful alternative to bought crackers. It’s also the perfect thing to make from failed bread experiments – I once made a whole container of nut flavoured crackers from a heavier than expected loaf of walnut bread. It was the perfect accompaniment to cheese.

Best of all, I can continue to bake like a crazy women, knowing that none of the bread will ever get wasted!

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