Food storage hacks

[WindFlower92]

My new years' resolution for 2021 is to waste less food. I've decided to do a monthly meal plan and buy veg when we need it. Anyone got any good hacks to help me save food/leftovers? I saw a good one the other day that said to cut up onions when you get them and freeze them, so will be doing that! Anyone else?

For onions, I buy the frozen chopped ones, but I've noticed that the eschalion shallots keep for MONTHS. I had some in my vegetable drawer for 6 months, and they were still firm, with no shoots.

I freeze sliced mushrooms and halves of lemons, leftover herbs, pieces of ginger root rather than letting them fester! Whatever I don't use up really.
Everything gets used up within about four months when I defrost the freezer.

We freeze mixes of chopped onion, carrot and celery for soups and casseroles. Ifreeze chopped swede too as although it's long lasting uncut I was forever leaving a chunk behind to moulder. Now it's there to throw in stews if we want.

As you can tell though it's not meal planning as such but using up all we have!

I wouldn't bother cutting up onions to freeze, they last for weeks in the fridge, so you'll get through them unless you use hardly any in cooking.

I do freeze celery because we only use the odd stick in cooking. Also lemon slices, herbs and pesto frozen in ice cube trays. Plus peppers and odd leftover tins of beans or tomatoes that we have no immediate use for. The latter I collect up in a big chilli every so often.

I buy frozen cubes of crushed garlic and ginger. Cheaper and no prep, so win win.

Other thing to remember is that many things last a lot longer than the use by date, so don't automatically throw anything out that is out of date.

Fruit and vegetables don't need a date, so ignore it and go by the state of the item. Perfectly acceptable to cut off any slightly mushy bits and use the rest. See above about freezing anything you can't use immediately.

Milk, yogurt, cheese etc is all fine for days, weeks or even months after the date. Use eyes and nose, and carefully taste to assess. If it looks and tastes OK, it is OK.

Meat, fish and ready meals are probably OK for at least a day or sometimes two after the useby date, but assess on a case by case basis. Be aware that some things go off before the date, but others are fine afterwards.

Not a storage tip but one thing that has massively reduced waste here is having one day a week on the meal plan that is left blank. In my household things are always changing (admittedly a lot more so pre Covid ), you end up eating out, kids get an invite to a friends house, you can’t be bothered to cook and do bean on toast etc etc. The blank day allows you to use up the food that got knocked off in your change of plan or other leftovers from the past week. There’s always store cupboard bits, eggs, cheese etc in anyway so if there isn’t anything that needs using up just make something like tuna pasta, frittata or grab something from the freezer.

Good idea @AtleastitsnotMonday, I'm rubbish at actually looking in the cupboards and it drives DH mad! He's good at cooking and me less so so I feel less confident at 'whipping something up'. That needs to change, along with the fact that using food that says it's out of date freaks me out so I always throw it away even if DH tells me it's okay!

I check and write a list every couple of days of food that needs to be eaten. Sometimes it's at that point I'll bung it in a container and freeze it. Or note down what to cook the following day.

Tight meal planning is less useful here.