Come on, be honest: what ends up languishing at the back of your fridge at the end of the week? 'Fess up about your most neglected foodstuffs to Unilever Project Sunlight - and be in with a chance to win £250 NOW CLOSED

[AnnMumsnet]

Most of us make an effort to plan our shop and minimise food waste, but even with the best will in the world, all too often we end up with items left over - and the people from the Unilever Project Sunlight would like to know which are your repeat waste offenders. Is there a fruit that always gathers mould at the bottom of the bowl? Or what about the last spoonful of pasta sauce that you swore you'd use up? Are you afflicted by unconsumed anchovies? Stressed out by surplus celery?

Please share what - despite your best efforts - you find yourself regularly binning on kitchen clean out day. And just to even things up a bit, why not let us know which foods you'd rate as your enduring heroes: the ones that could sit happily on your shelves and emerge perfectly edible even in the event of a nuclear apocalypse ...

Add your comment to the thread and you'll be entered into a prize draw where one MNer will win a a £250 voucher for the store of their choice.

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thanks and good luck
MNHQ

Lettuce

Salad bags
The last third of a cucumber
Cooked meat -usually ham that starts to go slimy after a couple of days

Tinned baked beans and mushy peas . Always have at least a portion left over but no meal requiring them within a week or so. So they sit and become ...interesting.

I throw very little out. One thing I never seem to get to the end of before the four weeks from opening is up is tomato puree. Occasionally a clove of garlic will sprout, the last few grapes will go mouldy or a carrot will go limp.

Butternut squash and hispie cabbages last for ages.

Bagged lettuce always goes slimy if you don't use the whole bag the day you open it (well it does for me, anyway).

Carrots and celery do last really well in the fridge, but if they're beginning to look limp, I dice them and freeze to use as a sofritto base with onion when making soup, casserole or whatever.

Lettuce. At least I think it was. It's called, 'your Mam's been making hooch in the fridge again kids!'.

I am always finding half eating tubs of coleslaw , out of date yogurts and Soggy fruit in the fridge.

piece of cucumber really do not know where I buy it never gets eaten fully

Random cabbagey thing which comes frequently in the autumn months in my organic veg box - there is only so many variations of cabbage recipes my family will put up with.

The lone spring onion which somehow got lost from its mates earlier on in the week (at least I think it was from this week - hang on, from the look of it, it might have been several weeks ago).

Container of cream with only 50ml left in it (recipe only asked for 200 ml) - what to do with a stray 50ml of cream?

Like many others, an eights of a bag full of liquidized lettuce.

Yogurt. I buy it to use in a recipe and them aim to eat the rest with muesli but it nearly always goes to waste.

I have been known to 'drink' the rest of a tub of cream so as not to waste it. Lovely!

Salad bags and coleslaw!

Half used tubs of creme fraiche.... They have a clear lid so the science experiment is clear to see!

Cucumber, green peppers when you've bought one of those mixed packs and used the red and yellow ones, creme fraiche, when i use half a pack for my chicken in white wine dish and the other half festers in the fridge, colslaw, salad leaves, pesto, half a pack of bacon. DH does the weekly shop, and he's got a lot better at buying what we will eat and not too much, so we don't waste as much as we used to.

Usually some form of fruit or veg that hasn't been eaten - usually potatoes or bananas! And theres always something left in a jar such as pesto or salad dressing.

I try SO hard not to waste anything but there is always something

Ham. I buy the cheaper stuff which comes in big packs. I use it one day for a sandwich or an omelette and wrap it in a food bag to use the next day, but I always forget.

Houmous- I like it, I eat it, but it ends up going off after 30 seconds and then I constantly forget/feel guilty about throwing it away.

Lettuce always gets thrown out as although I love salad, I am the only one in the house that eats it so inevitably by the end of the week there are some left. Fruit juice always gets binned (so I don't buy it anymore). It gets opened then forgotten about. Cheese can be a loser too, only my SOn eats it so it goes mouldy before we get through it.

Loads of stuff I'm terrible at planning.

There's a few things that only I eat and they often get wasted. Things like cottage cheese and hummus which I like but only now and again!

Also some things are only available in large (relative to what we can eat) amounts - raw and cooked beetroot, fresh bean sprouts, pots of soured cream or creme fraiche.

We never seem to finish a full tub of cream before it goes off, so always chuck half of it out. On the other side DH opens a new jar of pickled onions every Christmas Day and they last him a whole year. He swears they taste no different 11 months after being opened

Lettuce. Never quite finish the bag before it goes limp.
Cream cheese. Youngest loves it but doesn't go through it fast enough.
Salsa. Open a jar. Sits in there for months after.
One or two cherry toms. Obviously they escape from the packet, then die at the bottom of the fridge.

Milk- we don't use much in our house but keep a pint in just in case someone calls round and wants a cup of tea. As you can imagine, we only tend to get visitors when the milk is out of date or on the rare occasion it's all been used because I've had cereal

I'm pretty good at not wasting food and can generally find a use for anything, which means it doesn't have to be thrown out.
However, I can never find a use for dips...the bog standard cheese and chive type ones. I often buy them for parties (for which I always over cater!) and they don't get eaten and then they just go to waste.
I should just stop buying them really...

Coleslaw. I only want to eat a little of it, but the tubs are always too big and it doesn't last long. Really a should make my own.

I always have semi ancient packets of various cheese in my fridge that seem to last forever. I also always ignore use by dates on yoghurt a and eggs. Easy to test if it's off or not.

DD's spaghetti hoops (she doesn't eat that many, but the big tins cost so little extra compared to the small tins I always wind up with too much!)

Salad - always bought with such good intentions....

Definitely salad items - cucumber, lettuce etc. Also hummus - the small pots are too small and the normal pots are too big. Surely someone could make something in between!

It's usually half open tins of beans or spaghettin that I've opened for the kids and then decided that they don't want the rest.