This post has also been added to the bottom of my How To Be A Secretly Cheap and Cheerful Chef page!

Well I still haven’t worked out how to have a blog within a blog so am just adding to the bottom of the original page!

I’m fed up with throwing away odds and ends of veg, even though I compost, it still seems such a waste so recently, I’ve been testing out freezing anything and everything that would otherwise be discarded.

I am now religious about zesting citrus fruits before I use them – even if my daughter is having an orange to take to school, off comes the zest before it goes in her bag!  Equally, if I need zest and don’t have any frozen, I freeze the juice in ice cube trays if the recipe doesn’t use it.

When eggs get to date, they get the ice cube treatment too – just break them, beat them, stick them in a lightly oiled ice cube tray and then use for egg washing or even scrambled eggs at a later date.  I’ve yet to try them in cakes but I can’t see why they wouldn’t work.  I think that I get a lot less wastage by using them this way for egg washes – one eggy ice cube is usually more than enough and is probably about a third of an egg.

I always seem to have one or two sticks of celery left over and I’m the only one in the household who likes it raw so this is particularly the case in the summer when I’m having it in salads.  Celery loses a lot of its crunch after being frozen but when you’re using it in stews and soups that really doesn’t matter.  Clean and chop up any left over celery stalks then blanche in boiling water for about 3 minutes.  Remove it from the boiling water and then plunge into iced water to stop the cooking process.  Drain it once it is properly cooled and then pat dry with either a clean tea towel or some absorbent kitchen paper then freeze and use in soups and stews in the same way you would the raw stuff.  If you don’t blanche it, then it will only keep in the freezer for 6 – 8 weeks but blanched it will last a year.