The Freezer Is Your Friend: Tips and Recipes to Save Money and Reduce Food Waste - The Elm - The Elm

The Freezer Is Your Friend: Tips and Recipes to Save Money and Reduce Food Waste

April 26, 2024 Ben Eglash

With food prices soaring, the UMB Office of Sustainability and Yes Chef! offer helpful tips and recipes.

Stop Food Waste Day and Earth Month have just passed, but for the University of Maryland, Baltimore's Office of Sustainability, every day is Stop Food Waste Day. Here are some tips and recipes to reduce food waste:

Tip No. 1: The freezer is your friend! Food will keep much longer in the freezer than it will in the fridge. If you have too much food to eat, freeze the raw ingredients and cook one portion at a time when the craving strikes. Or cook everything and freeze the extra portions. It is even more difficult to shop and cook for one, so make sure to freeze what you will not use or eat soon, and you will be amazed at how much food (and money) you can save!

Bonus Tip: Buy a vacuum sealer to keep things fresh in the freezer for even longer. It may seem expensive, but you will save money in the long run by wasting less food.

Tip No. 2: Swap your fresh fruit and vegetables for equally nutritious frozen fruits and veggies. Fresh fruits and vegetables often spoil much faster than other groceries. Opting for frozen options of fresh produce can drastically reduce the amount of food you’re buying that ends up spoiling. Frozen food has advanced so much in recent years that there is no limit to the types of food you can buy and store in your freezer.

Tip No. 3: Save all your vegetable scraps to eventually make a homemade vegetable stock. Roots, peels, cores, stems, stalks, excess — refrigerate everything in a Tupperware container and once you have enough you simply dump the contents into a pot of boiling water, simmer, then strain until you have your very own, delicious vegetable stock.

Tip No. 4: You’ll never learn if you don’t try. Take a single or couples cooking class, try a new cuisine, or attempt a new recipe — if you cook chicken, learn how to break it down yourself. Cooking at home will end up saving you a lot of money in the long run, and you will learn a skill that will be useful and impressive for the rest of your life. If you don’t want to pay for a class, the internet has everything you need to become a proficient cook.

Concluding Advice

Be conscious about your portion sizes; not everything should be supersized. We all crave convenience, but once we get food, we often don’t care about anything else. Think about what happens next and try to compost your food scraps when possible. If you order food, try to reduce the amount of packaging waste. We tend to consider how our choices affect ourselves, but not how our choices affect the environment.

If you want to reduce food waste, save money, and benefit the environment, use the advice in this article and check out Yes Chef! They offer affordable, nutritious, subscription-free heat and eat meals and recently opened a cafe on the first-floor lobby of the SMC Campus Center (621 W. Lombard St.). A changing menu and a variety of options ensure there is something for everybody. Below are some recipes to help fight food waste from the head chef himself.

3 Delicious Recipes to Help you Fight Food Waste

Banana Bread UMB: Don’t throw away your old bananas. Those brown bananas you didn’t eat are perfect for making banana bread.

Bread Pudding UMB: Don’t throw away your old bread. Stale bread is recommended for bread pudding.

Tofu Dish: Even if you’re not vegan/vegetarian, this recipe is a good addition for those trying to eat less meat. Reducing meat consumption may not only benefit your health, but it will benefit the environment, too.

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Miso Roasted Salmon Recipe - NYT Cooking - The New York Times

Updated April 25, 2024

Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Megan Hedgpeth.

With this fish, less is more: The salty, umami balm of a miso marinade is lightened with lemon zest, which lends floral bittersweetness, and with lemon juice, which brings electric tang and tenderness. Salmon fillets cut into smaller, thinner portions — as they are for a Japanese breakfast spread — end up more evenly cooked and allow the marinade to flavor the fish more intensely (see Tip). If you can find it, yuzu would be fabulous here in place of the lemon. Serve with white rice, miso soup and goma-ae.

Featured in: Let This Breakfast Change Your Life

Learn: How to Cook Salmon

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Ingredients

Yield:4 servings

• 3tablespoons miso, preferably shiro (white) or awase (mixed; see Tips)
• 2tablespoons mirin
• 1teaspoon soy sauce
• 1teaspoon avocado or canola oil, plus more for greasing pan
• 1teaspoon lemon zest
• 1tablespoon lemon juice
• 4(4-ounce) salmon fillets, preferably with skin (see Tips)

Ingredient Substitution Guide

Nutritional analysis per serving (4 servings)

283 calories; 17 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 0 grams trans fat; 5 grams monounsaturated fat; 5 grams polyunsaturated fat; 4 grams carbohydrates; 1 gram dietary fiber; 1 gram sugars; 25 grams protein; 615 milligrams sodium

Note: The information shown is Edamam’s estimate based on available ingredients and preparation. It should not be considered a substitute for a professional nutritionist’s advice.

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Preparation

1. In a shallow dish, stir together the miso, mirin, soy sauce, oil, lemon zest and lemon juice. Add the salmon, turn to coat, cover and refrigerate overnight or for up to 48 hours.

2. When ready to cook, heat the oven to 450 degrees and line a sheet pan with foil. Grease the foil with oil, then lay the salmon down, on the cut sides if possible.

3. Bake until charred at the edges, 7 minutes for medium-rare or 9 minutes for medium. Serve immediately.

Tips

• To cut salmon fillets into thinner long portions as you would find in a Japanese breakfast spread, start with a skin-on fillet that’s ¾- to 1-inch thick, scrape off any scales, then cut the fillet into 1-inch-wide strips.
• Shiro (white) miso is made with a higher proportion of rice, which lends a milder, sweeter flavor. Awase (mixed) miso typically combines shiro and aka (red) miso for a balanced salty sweetness. You can substitute other varieties of miso if you can’t find either white or mixed.

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Baba ghanoush with a twist: Jimmy Richardson of Gerard's Bistro in Brisbane digs deeper into Lebanese cuisine - The Australian Financial Review

Gerard’s baba ghanoush

Degree of difficulty ★☆☆ | Serves 4 as a snack with flatbread

At Gerard’s, Richardson chars the eggplant over coals. At home, you can do this on a normal barbecue, sear in a lightly oiled pan, or roast the eggplant cut-side down in an oven until soft.

Ingredients

• 800g eggplant (e.g. two medium)
• 65g tahini paste (3 tbsp)
• 90g toum (garlic sauce)
• 2g cumin powder
• 25ml extra virgin olive oil
• juice of 1 lemon (35ml)
• 1 tsp sea salt flakes
• Half tsp ras el hanout or paprika

Method

Cut each eggplant in half and cross-hatch the flesh with a knife.

Place the eggplants, flesh-side down, directly on charcoal and cook until soft and blackened, then turn them skin-side down to cook all the way through.

After grilling, it’s best to let the eggplant rest and cool down, allowing the moisture to drain away.

When cooled, gently scrape the eggplant flesh off the charred skin.

Place it in a bowl and gently break it down in your hands by squeezing it. This gives a better, coarser texture than blitzing it in a mixer, which just purées it.

You should have about 400g of charred, skinned eggplant. Add the tahini paste, toum, cumin, olive oil, lemon juice and sea salt, mixing everything thoroughly.

Check for seasoning, dust with ras el hanout or paprika, and serve with grilled flatbread.

Tip: Richardson recommends Al Kanater tahini (sesame paste). Toum is a Lebanese garlic sauce – if you can’t find it, add 1 to 2 finely grated cloves of garlic.

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Nestlé makes meals to remember | shots - Shots

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Spinach Gomaae Recipe - NYT Cooking - The New York Times

Updated April 24, 2024

Kerri Brewer for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Spencer Richards.

A nutty, savory-sweet sesame dressing coats spinach in this Japanese dish, horenso no gomaae. It comprises four impactful ingredients that taste especially great with a bowl of white rice or as part of a breakfast spread with soup and salmon. Gomaae, pronounced go-MAH-ae, means sesame sauce and is more than just a recipe: Toasted sesame seeds, ground to a tan powder and simply mixed with soy sauce and sugar, are an excellent flavor canvas for spinach and beyond. You can swap in any vegetable, really, but sprightly, crunchy ones like lightly boiled green beans, sugar snap peas and broccoli shine with this application.

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Ingredients

Yield:4 servings

• 3tablespoons toasted white sesame seeds (see Tip)
• 1tablespoon soy sauce
• 2teaspoons sugar
• 1bunch mature spinach (8 to 10 ounces), ends trimmed

Ingredient Substitution Guide

Nutritional analysis per serving (4 servings)

64 calories; 4 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 0 grams trans fat; 1 gram monounsaturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 6 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams dietary fiber; 2 grams sugars; 3 grams protein; 271 milligrams sodium

Note: The information shown is Edamam’s estimate based on available ingredients and preparation. It should not be considered a substitute for a professional nutritionist’s advice.

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Preparation

1. In a spice grinder or mortar, grind the toasted sesame seeds into a coarse powder. Or, crush the seeds with a heavy pot or skillet on a cutting board. Add to a medium bowl along with the soy sauce and sugar. Stir to combine.

2. Bring 4 cups of water to a boil in a kettle or saucepan. Wash and drain the spinach in a colander. With the colander in the sink, carefully pour the boiled water over the spinach to wilt it. Drain, then transfer the spinach to a clean kitchen towel and wring out any excess water or simply press with a spoon to expel water.

3. Add the spinach to the bowl with the sauce and toss to combine. Serve at room temperature or chilled.

Tip

• If you have untoasted sesame seeds, simply heat them in a small skillet over medium-low, shaking the pan occasionally, until the seeds are light brown and fragrant with nuttiness, about 5 minutes.

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What Would a TikTok Ban Mean for the Food World? - Eater

A version of this post originally appeared in the March 17, 2024 edition of Weekend Extra, a place for the freshest news from the food world. Subscribe now.

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The House passed legislation on Wednesday, March 13, that could lead to a ban on TikTok in the United States if the app’s owner, the Chinese company ByteDance, doesn’t sell its stake in the app. On Tuesday, April 23, the Senate followed suit, and on Wednesday, April 24, President Biden signed the bill into law. Now, ByteDance must divest from the app within a year. It is “the most serious threat yet to the video-streaming app’s future in the U.S.,” according to NPR.

American legislators have argued that the app is a national security threat since, as the AP explains, “ByteDance is beholden to the Chinese government, which could demand access to the data of TikTok’s consumers in the U.S. any time it wants.” (This kind of tracking has precedent.)

A TikTok ban — should it go into effect — would have huge ramifications for the food world, given that TikTok has surpassed Instagram and traditional food publications as the way to launch a food career today. Because of its algorithm, the app offers budding food creators the possibility of “explosive growth” and has, as a result, reshaped the landscape of food stardom, the cookbook world, and even the grocery store. The hashtag #FoodTok accounts for at least 2.6 million posts, and the app has become the de facto way many people encounter new recipes. What would a ban mean for the food world?

It’s not the first time this question has come up. In May 2023, the state of Montana passed legislation banning TikTok in the state, though it was blocked by a federal judge in November who cited that it violated free speech. At the time of the bill’s passing, Montana-based food creator Spencre McGowan, known on TikTok for her cottagecore cooking videos, told NBC News that the app provided her with essential income, thanks to brand sponsorships on her social content. Food creators told Bon Appétit that because of TikTok’s faster growth compared to other platforms, their earning potential on the app is higher. The app has become a “lifeline,” one creator told NPR on the heels of the current national legislation.

Beyond finances, however, Bon Appétit’s Sam Stone noted that any potential TikTok ban would especially harm new and budding cooks, recipe developers, and food creators as the app, despite its problems and annoyances, has “already helped remove many of the gatekeeping and other hurdles that amateur chefs may face taking a more traditional path in the food world.” Essentially, creators who have pre-established followings on other platforms or have the backing of traditional media or publishing would be slightly insulated from the loss of the short-form video platform by virtue of their other avenues for recipe and content distribution.

Of course, restaurants, however begrudgingly, also rely on TikTok more and more for business. The app has proven to be a hugely powerful marketing tool with a sense of populism, which is especially compelling for restaurants who might not have the resources for a flashy PR firm. There’s a general sense that TikTok can save a struggling restaurant from going under — and it has. When restaurants are desperate to stay in business, the app can be the one thing keeping the lights on. The app has also revitalized interest in older restaurants: Despite having been open for five years, New York City’s Golden Diner, for example, has recently seen a huge surge of new customers, leading to hours-long waits.

If there’s any immediate takeaway for food creators and other food businesses that rely on TikTok, it’s this: Relying on any single app for your livelihood is a risky choice, especially when all of them are subject to huge forces outside their control. Diversification is the name of the game.

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Top 7 Effortless Late-Night Dinner Ideas For Busy Weeknights - Slurrp

By

Bhavana Verma

Updated:Apr 24, 2024

Choosing what to cook when you don't want to cook feels like the hardest task at the end of a long day at work. For such lazy weeknights, here are amazing lazy dinner ideas that prepare a nutritious meal without the fuss.

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