Are You a Scrapper? 5 Winning Ideas (+1 Recipe) for Food Waste

Why make waste when you can make magic?  Tess Masters, AKA The Blender Girl, joins us this week to show how food scraps can be repurposed into fresh ideas. Her simple yet satisfying tips show us how to infuse more flavor into your dishes and get extra nutrients and fiber, all while reducing your contribution to landfills and stretching your dollars.

Here are Tess’s 5 creative ideas to bring leftovers to life:

1. Give smoothies some substance. Apple peels, citrus peels, and juicing leftovers like pulp from beets, carrots, spinach, and other fruits and vegetables all make fantastic fiber-rich additions to smoothies. Use a sweet fruit as a base, then add the scraps gradually to taste. Pro tip: you can also freeze these smoothies as fruit pops or dehydrate into fruit leathers!

2. Boil a mean broth. Boil up a variety of veggie scraps to make a heartier homemade broth. You can also add veggie pulp and other leftovers to your soup blends.

3. Supplement a sauce. Juice pulp, tomato skins, carrot peels, broccoli stalks, and other vegetable scraps can help you sneak some extra veggies into pasta or pizza sauce for kiddie cuisine classics.

4. Whip up a repurposed pudding. Blend cooked rice, quinoa, millet, or other grains with milk to make delicious, all-but-instant pudding. Cooked brown rice and leftover apple, for example, can be used to create a delicious breakfast or dessert.

5. Give baked goods a boost. Carrot peels, apple peels, citrus zest, zucchini, spinach, beet, and other vegetable pulps make wonderful additions to muffins, breads, and cookies. I use orange peels to bring zing to this quick and tasty gluten-free vegan treat:

Chocolate Orange Fruit Balls

(Makes about 20 balls; use organic ingredients when possible)

1 cup mixed raw nuts (I used 1/3 cup each of raw almonds, cashews, and macadamias)

1/2 cup chopped pitted dates

1/2 cup chopped dried apricots

1/2 cup raisins

2 tablespoon raw cacao powder or unsweetened cocoa powder

1 tablespoon fresh orange juice

1 tablespoon chopped orange peel

1/4 cup shredded dried coconut (unsweetened)

1. Spread shredded coconut out on a plate.

2. Put all other ingredients in a food processor fitted with the “S” blade. Process until the mixture comes together in a ball (takes about a minute).

3. Roll into small balls, coat with the coconut mixture, and enjoy! Store in a sealed glass container and refrigerate.

~Tess Masters

Tess Masters (theblendergirl.com) is a presenter, cook, and author of The Blender Girl cookbook and The Blender Girl Smoothies app. 

How do you make the most from your food waste? Let us know in the comments!