Admit it - anyone thrown away food they bought recently?

[alloutoffucks]

Lots of people including me are saying how hard it is getting in some places to buy fresh vegetables and meat. So admit it. Has anyone recently bought too much and ended up throwing it away?

Looks good ninkanink

(Case in point - we had plain sour cream in the fridge so I could have used that like we usually do, but I had saved the little bit of ranch dressing from the night before so we had that instead. This is what we routinely do - Of course that’s just a little thing, but 100 little things add up, and now we still have half a tub of sour cream to use for something else)

Yes the yoghurts I bought ended up being out of date and smelly but i used up the out of date jelly we ate that

Any suggestions for 700g cooked pork? I'm usually the one full of ideas but cooking 3 meals a day for a week has somewhat sapped my creativity!!

This dish could be made even more cheaply from scratch if you don’t have leftover chilli - use a tin of black beans, red kidney beans or mixed beans, with the liquid from the tin and cumin, smoked chilli or paprika if you have it, chilli flakes, oregano, salt and pepper. Cook down slowly until soft, then mash it all together. Layer with the tortilla chips and cheese, pop into the oven, cook for 10 min and serve with whatever fresh salad veg you have on hand.

Is it a pork roast or mince?

And how many people do you need to feed?

Not yet. I did have to throw out some honey that blew the top off the bottle, wouldnt risk that. We very rarely throw food away and what bits of veg we dont eat end up in the compost bin. However if anyone knows a use for cauliflower stalk I'm willing to give it a go. I eat some pretty wierd combinations when using up the stuff other people might throw away. We've never eaten the end of the cucumber though - dont really know why.

Was a pork roast, so I have 4 slabs of pork each about an inch thick. Have to feed 2 adults and 2 kids who aren't picky thank goodness. I'm usually a great cook, I'm just blanking.

Grate the cauli stalk and stir fry with any cold leftover rice, peas, pancetta, spring onions, scrambled egg, season with soy sauce and sesame oil. If you don't have any rice to bulk out, just grate the cauli stalk and freeze until you do!

Or add to potatoes you're boiling for mash

Can you shred the pork and add bbq sauce for pulled pork?
Use in sandwiches, nachos or whatever.

If it were me I would stretch it to two meals but I guess you might not want to.

You could just make up some gravy, pour it over the slices of pork and heat through gently in the oven, and serve it like a roast again.

Or you could make it into two meals:

Slice two lots of meat very thinly. Make up an Asian broth (Chinese, Thai, Korean or Japanese), slice whatever veg you want in the soup very thinly to match the pork, boil up one egg per person, cut in half and serve everything on top of noodles or rice.

Slice two lots of meat very thinly. Fry onions, garlic and whatever veg you want with similar spices to above for nachos, add the meat, pad out with rice and serve with wraps/tacos or, my favourite, wrapped in lettuce leaves.

Slice two lots of meat very thinly. Fry onion and whatever veg you have, add the meat to warm through, and make sandwiches (if you have baguette/crusty bread/panini even better) with rocket or whatever leaves you have.

Will think if I can come up with any more.

A stir fry would be good, of course.

Or Asian pancakes.

I threw away the mango that went straight from unripe to black and I'm going to pick through the dubious grapes in the fridge.. but I’ve got my DM's frugal cookbooks from before and during the war, with many spiffing wheezes.
Apart from that, I’ve made some strange soup too, and garlic croutons from a stale sliced loaf, left over because no one fancied it much, apart from fried.

If you have room in your freezer you can freeze the grapes and eat them like little sorbet pops.

If anyone has a mango that refuses to properly ripen you can make mango salad with it.

No, nothing.

I’ve just made a huge pan of minestrone with some sorry looking veg, Some tomato sauce left over from last night, stock & white beans.
Enough for lunch today and Monday, and my kitchen smells fab.

I’d usually be rushing between Parkrun and swimming lessons. Weird but better than sitting doing nothing.

Other than the odd soggy strawberry in the packet ( inevitability a couple in each packet regardless of the date on the front) or manky looking individual spinach leaves in the packet. So pretty much the same amount as normal.
What I am really, really struggling to find some long life lactose free milk for DD at the moment. Everything else has been available sporadically (pasta, rice, tinned tomatoes) but long life milk in all its various forms has been sold out everywhere round here for almost 3 weeks. If we end up quarantined for 14 days then DD would have to go without milk.

Is almond milk suitable? I saw quite a lot of that the last few times I went to our local asda. Also our local Tesco express stocks a few cartons of uht milk. If you’ve got one nearby you could potentially ask when they’re re stocking and ask them to hold one for you?

Oh duh the uht milk won’t be lactose free. Sorry. Amazon? I know they’re prioritising food and medical supplies atm.

No - we're being frugal and careful now - stopping the kids just grabbing any old snack at any time. That's actually one of the only positives I see coming out of this whole isolation thing - a return to more frugal/sensible eating patterns.We had fallen into some bad eating habits as a family, I've teen boys who would fall on the kitchen like a pack of locusts - not any more!

No. Husband is sick so we've been in isolation and haven't left the house since Monday. I've been fairly militant about us using up everything in the fridge before it goes off.

I would presume OP that a lot of the extra fresh food that's been purchased recently has been frozen, either straight away or after some form of cooking. If everyone in the country had done something as minor as decided to make an extra bolognese/ragu for the freezer this week, and bought nothing else they wouldn't usually, that would still have had a massive impact on the amount of fresh meat and veg available.

No! I will admit that we are usually pretty disorganised and do end up binning some stuff most weeks but lately we've been really good at using the fresh stuff first

Maybe a small positive to come out of this (if it lasts).

Well I ain't keeping this one 🤢