Using leftovers

I woke to find I’d been listening to the Zoe podcast about food waste. Apparently 40% of the world’s food goes into landfill and creates more global warming than all the planes flying in a year. We fly a lot and do feel guilty but we do creative accounting to justify it by not having a pet, not buying flowers flown here, not buying bottled water, buying locally and walking to the shops instead of driving, using public transport when we can and so on. Now I can add never throwing out food to the list. Because we are going away on Friday I have been using up everything in the fridge.

Wizzened parsnips, aged carrots, a few limp sticks of celery, quarter of a bag of very slightly slimy spinach, 2 chillies, one spring onion, a lump of ginger, some wrinkly mushrooms, the last onion and leftover potatoes were used to make a curried soup (half the onion, the parsnips, half the carrots, ginger, one chilli, the celery and spinach - with the spring onion to garnish! And veggie chilli (other half of the onion, half the carrots, the chillies and mushrooms plus a tin of tomatoes and a tin of kidney beans. I’ll pop the potatoes, sliced on top, and grate on some cheese. This will go in the Rayburn oven when it’s on tonight. It will be accompanied by a coleslaw made with the last 1/6 of a cabbage, carrot and left over raita from our recent curry with the left over hummus mixed in.

I felt quite virtuous till I saw the peelings in the sink. Will they make gas? They are going in the garden compost. You can’t win.

I went to Morpeth in the bus to get my hair cut.

Carole in Suffolk was at Roger’s funeral today and very kindly got me an order of service. She met lots of old friends from CND days. I was sad we couldn’t go but the 600 mile round trip was too close to us leaving on Friday.

This damp weather is giving me very sore knees. Next week I’ll be complaining about the heat.

Soup on the left, chilli on the right.