A Visit to Love Food Hate Waste at Newbury Farmers' Market

Jul 1, 2011

Love Food Hate Waste is a campaign I'd heard of before but didn't know too much about. One weekend in June they attended the Newbury farmers' market so I got a chance to find out more about it. It is a national campaign to try and get us all to be less wasteful. Every year in the UK we throw away £10 billion worth of food. That's mad. 

Their message is very simple; waste as little food as possible. They've got lots of recipes, tips and useful gadgets available to help but if the message is taken on board, you can't go far wrong. A cookery demonstration was being given by Ilja from the Pudding Pie cookery school making all sorts of things you might throw away into lovely delicious meals.

My favourite thing was Thai chicken with sour cream dressing and curly kale potato cakes. It was such a lovely marriage of flavours and used up left over mash, chicken and salad. I also gobbled up a few pieces of a lovely apple and polenta cake. The recipes Ilja cooked can be found here. The potato cakes she made were so good!

None of the ideas make a meal that will be just acceptable, they are meals you'd be more than happy to eat all the time. To be honest, Boxing day is a day of leftovers and it has to be one of my favourite days for stuffing my face. For me, I have found if you have eggs or potatoes, you can mix pretty much anything in and make a pretty good meal. Take last year when I had more broad beans than I knew what to do with, I cracked a few eggs and got myself a lovely omelette. For left over mashed potato, make some bubble and squeak - you could mix anything in.

With leftovers I think a bit of creativity can turn an average meal into a really interesting one.

Caroline Taylor
http://www.allthatimeating.com/
Questions or comments? allthatimeating@gmail.com