Wasting food? Not here!

         As we approach our last month at Brainfood, as an instructor, I always scramble to think of any last important lessons to teach our students before they leave us. They’ve already learned so much; knife skills, safety and sanitation, low-fat baking, healthy breakfast foods and whole grains. Have we forgotten anything?! 

       This week’s class was devoted to using food ingredients that are usually thrown away or wasted. Considering that in the U.S, we now waste more than 40% of our food, this topic seemed like something we shouldn’t skip over! So we dug deep into the back of our fridges to find the neglected, bruised and mushy produce that would normally get thrown away. 

       We used blackened bananas (the more rotten the better) to make delicious banana bread muffins. We threw some chocolate chips in there and our students didn’t even remember that the bananas were oozing and old. 

      Next, to warm us up from all this rain, we made cheddar broccoli soup, with milk on the verge of expiring and the entire broccoli, stem and all! We then used a stale baguette to make fresh bruschetta with a basil pesto spread on top. While cooking, we made sure not to waste any scrap, the crumbs of bread were eaten, and even the muffin bowl was licked clean, for the sake of preventing waste of course!

     Discussing this topic made us all excited to go home and look into our own fridges to see what we have that may go bad, and to use it in creative ways. We are all so fortunate to be able to cook and eat together every week, and are equally fortunate to have access to these ingredients, we should not take that for granted.