No one likes to waste food. In this video, Chris shows you how to reduce food waste by making the most of the leftover vegetables in your fridge.

If you'd like to see the ingredients or download a highly accessible version of this recipe, you can do that here.

 

Chris: Hello I'm Chris and I'm a seven-year veteran stroke survivor. I don't know about anybody else but the amount of times we go shopping and we end up buying too much. And at the end of the week, we look in our fridge and we've got a spare pepper that we haven't used. Maybe something like a spare carrot we haven't used and some celery. And maybe that half an onion that we didn't end up using up.

And I'd like to show you a way of utilising this and not throwing this in the bin so we get more production from our food with limited waste.

What I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna prepare some rough chopped vegetables because I want to use up what's left over in our fridge. I am so against any form of waste.

Now you'll see I've just cut the carrot into what we call batons and they're going to go into my bowl ready for me to roast these vegetables.

I've got half an onion that I haven't utilised during my week of cooking. I don't want it to go to waste. I don't want it to go mushy. So I'm gonna cook and roast this up. Because this makes for a good roasted vegetable that I can freeze down and use later in the week or later in the month. Now with my onion all I'm going to do is cut this into wedge shapes. I'm not going to dice it down small and that can go into my bowl.

[Music]

My pepper, I just want chunks that I can roast down.

And I will utilise some of my leftover celery in exactly the same way but I'm not going to cut this up small. I just want exactly the same size batons roughly as my carrots.

And they're going to go all in there.

And I'm not going to let my garlic go all mushy and to waste. I don't need to chop my garlic up I'm just going to press and I'm just going to let that skin come off.

[Music]

And I can throw the whole bulb into my vegetables. I just want half a tablespoon of olive oil just to coat them.

I'm going to add half a teaspoon of black pepper and a teaspoon of dried mixed herbs. And that will help bring out the flavours.

Just make sure that the vegetables are nicely coated.

And then that will go on to my small baking tray because I just want to roast this down for 20 to 25 minutes.

And what I've then got is a few vegetables that I can freeze down at the end of the week and use at a later date for different dishes.

You could use your roasted vegetables again to make another soup. You could use them as a side dish as your roasted vegetables with a nice piece of chicken.

But it means you've got no waste left at the end of the week and you've used everything that was in your fridge at no cost to the environment. And you're not going to go and re-buy the same ingredients and throw them away again the next week.

We're just going to cook those down for 20 minutes in the oven at about 190 degrees.

So once I've utilised and cut up my leftover vegetables from the end of the week and I've roasted them for 20 minutes in the oven and I've allowed them to cool down, I then get a small what I call portion bowl. And then I'm going to take some of those vegetables and fill up that bowl to about what I would think would be a portion for a standard adult.

For those that again like me have limited mobility, I like to take a narrow jug, a freezer bag that I have at home and I put that into my jug.

Because I want to individually portion these down and freeze them for use at a later date. So I've got my bag in my jug and I buy the press and seal freezer bags from the pound shop and they fit into my jug. So I can put a portion of vegetables to use at a later date into my bag.

And I can bring that out, seal it down and that can go in my freezer. And I will do that until I've bagged up all my vegetables that I had left over from the previous week.

So that's how you get sustainability and you save a few pennies in the process.