Ever stare at a banana or pineapple peel and wonder what you could make from it? How about turning those food scraps into a subtly sweet cake with brown sugar frosting, or a refreshing, tart lemonade with mint? In her new cookbook, Cooking with Scraps, Lindsay-Jean Hard shows homecooks how to turn peels, cores and more into delicious meals.
“What lies unused in one’s fridge or pantry is not a purposeless object destined for the waste bin,” Hard says. “You’ll find recipes for the often unused parts—I’m assuming that if you buy carrots you already know how to use the carrot’s root—but you might not know how to make use of the greens.”
Cooking with Scraps, available October 30, 2018 from Workman Publishing, includes 85 recipes that transform food waste, including outdated produce, cheese rinds, stale bread, and other oft-discarded foods, into meals.
“For an ingredient to make it into the book, it had to be ‘worth it’ to me as a scrap. For example, when buying broccoli, generally enough of the stem is included that it makes sense to put it to use, but you won’t find a recipe focused around ginger peels, because not only does ginger not really need to be peeled, but even if you do peel it, you won’t generate enough peel at one time to turn into something else,” Hard says.
We decided to put some of her recipes to the test. Watch the video to see how we created a beautiful and delicious multi-course meal for a dinner party using recipes from Hard’s book.
Videography and video editing by Their Studio, food styling by Jenny Dorsey, words by Bridget Shirvell, Shot on location at the Institute of Culinary Education.
