Waste Not, Want Not

I don't know about you, but I wring everything I can out of foodstuffs. E.G.:

After roasting a chicken or turkey, I make stock and freeze it.

I recently had a bonanza of some great navel oranges; since I use dried orange peel a lot, I zested the oranges before eating them, dried the zest and ground it up in a dedicated coffee grinder (for Asian dishes, I leave some of the zest in strips).

When I had a whole bag of lemons, I made some preserved lemons and the rest squeezed out the juice and froze it in ice cube trays in 1 Tbs increments--ditto with juicing a surplus of limes.

So, how about you?

[Jenise]

I'm not nearly as industrious as you on make-aheads, but simmering on the stove right now is a perfect storm of orphan ingredients: leftover roasted pork from Friday (not the milk pork, this was a conventional roasted pork) that I didn't have another use for, a full container of cherry tomatoes that weren't flavorful enough for raw consumption, a handful of raw fennel fronds that had been in the freezer for two years, a couple strips of bacon leftover from breakfast a few weeks ago, some hot red chiles, several garlic cloves, chicken broth, thyme, fennel seed, bay leaves and a big splash of vermouth. The goal: a near duplicate of a super spicy "smoked pork and fennel" pasta sauce I had at a restaurant in Oakland, CA about 20 years ago. I absolutely LOVED it and have made my own version of that ever since. The fennel fronds are in fact frozen for just this purpose: every time I buy fennel I reserve the parts I cut away for just this sauce. Fabulous!

Two year old fennel fronds??? What was that about not keeping derelict things in the kitchen?

[Jenise]

Possibly only a year; truth is I don't know! I ran them under water, tasted them--yeah, no freezer burn--and in the pot they went.

I try and buy just what we need, so there is little waste.

We buy a years supply of Seville Oranges in the few weeks they are in the shops and freeze them, defrosting enough to make marmalade as we get down to our last jas.

But I don't make stock from chicken carcases; I eat a navel orange each day but have never used orange zest to such an extent I save the skins/zest. If I need zest - and its rare, I take it from that day's orange..

I do freeze my crop of chillies and use them throughout the year

Speaking of Seville oranges has everyone seen the ongoing chain of letters to the editor in the Guardian?
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/f ... althy-life

Quite a few of the ingredients I use in Thai and Chinese cooking are only sold in quantities too large to use up before they start to spoil, so I've had to figure out ways to preserve them:

o Fresh ginger. It keeps very well, and nearly forever, submerged in 100-proof vodka in mason jars in the refrigerator. And spoonfuls of the vodka can be used to add a ginger flavor to dishes, too.

o Fresh galangal. I tried the vodka trick, but galangal gets tough and fibrous and I wasn't happy with the results. The vodka picks up a nice galangal flavor, though. I now cut the galangal into manageable pieces and freeze it. That seems to do a much better job at preserving both the flavor and the texture.

o Fresh hot chiles. Thai red and green chiles (prik nu) and habaneros are readily available at my supermarket, but they sell them in packages 50 or so at a time, and except for a few dishes such as mahogany fire noodles or Inner Beauty hot sauce, you use them in onesies or twosies. Thanks to FLDG I found out that they freeze well, and that's what I do now.

o Fresh kaffir lime leaves, and whole kaffir limes. These both freeze well. At some point I'm going to defrost some of the whole kaffir limes and try the Moroccan preserved lemon trick on them.

-Paul W.