Waste not, want not is probably the most important saying anyone seeking to be self-sufficient should live by. Indeed, given the appalling amount of food waste in the western world generally, it should be something by which we should all be living. Anyway, the reason I mention it is that there are often foods that can be produced not just from leftovers, but from the waste from cooking that is not always regarded as edible.
Yesterday I ended up with a large quantity of cores and peel created from bottling apples. There are various options for using up this waste. If you have lifestock, it is a great feed. Alas, I have no livestock (yet). Instead, I put it all into a pan and boiled it then strained it overnight. The resulting liquid can then be made into a jelly, a job I shall carry out later today. I am actually going to make a spiced jelly for Christmas.
Photos and opinion on how it all went will be posted up within the next 24 hours.
4 comments:
Sounds good - I'll look forward to seeing how it went.
I tend to just pat myself on the back that my scraps go in the compost bin, but to be able to use them would be even better.
I'm contemplating apple schnapps at the moment, maybe cores and peels would work ok for that too.
I'm pleased to say the jelly went well. I'll post up some pics shortly. I added cinnamon powder to the jelly and this has given it a rather pleasant edge to the taste.
In a similar vein, keep peel from citrus fruit in a bag in the freezer. Add to the bag until it is full then use that for making a very pleasant jelly. If it is mainly lemon, it has a sharp taste to it.
We had a surplus of lemon peel recently so we put a handfull of peel aside, boiled then strained the rest. We then chopped and boiled the peel put to one side and then added it to the strained liquid, boiled it and had a rather pleasant lemon marmalade at the end, all made from waste lemon peel!
We store all our used citrus peel in the freezer as well, last time a bag full had collected I made candied peel from it which I'm looking forward to using as Christmas approaches.
I make apple vinegar from our apple cores. We've been self sufficient in vinegar for a few years now.
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