Food Waste - Recipe Book 

I am having fun coming up with new recipes for my recipe book Left But Not Least.

   To find inspiration beyond useful websites such as Love Food Hate Waste, I have bought two cookbooks: Waste Not, Want Not by Cinda Chavich; and The Leftovers Handbook by Suzy Bowler. However, the issues I found with these books - and others I have read in bookshops - is that they do not offer easy recipes. The ingredients lists are always huge, often requiring expensive kitchen utensils (e.g. pasta maker) and featuring extravagant elements such as 'cilantro', 'rice flower' and 'canola oil'. Additionally, cookbooks have long and boring introductions, and/or endless instructions for the step-by-step recipes. 

    Therefore, based on these observations, I developed the following idea: a simple recipe book presenting simple recipes using simple cooking methods. How else can I convince people to give a second chance to their leftovers? I want to provide recipes that don't put people off as soon as they open the first page.

    The recipe book will offer recipes I came up with myself, and will be illustrated with images from my own portfolio. I intend to create perhaps a few playful photomontages with different foods. Christine from the MA group said something very inspirational to me the other day. She told me that, just as my photomontages are compositions of various pictures, so my book is a composition of various recipes. That made it logical to use my artistic work for the book. Thanks Christine :D 

    My target audience - 16 to 80+ - will be free to alter the recipes to their taste. For instance, if they don't have chicken they can replace it with another meat; or if they don't like potatoes they may use carrots. So far, the two recipes I have invented are the following:

Pink Chicken (with mulled wine)

I thought I'd give funny and mysterious names to my recipes, because it matches the fun of coming up with a recipe using random leftovers from the fridge. So basically, the day I produced 'pink chicken' I had the following leftovers: chicken breast, ginger, half a lemon, and... mulled wine (yes, why not?). I started by cooking the raw chicken straight inside a pan with the mulled wine. I added grated ginger, some crushed garlic, lemon zest. I also spiced it up a bit by adding 5 spice condiment. Obviously the recipes of my book will supply all the information about quantities, even though I tend to do it by eye... Moreover, I will write in each recipe the extra ingredients that are optional (for example here the garlic and 5 spice). Anyway, back to the pink chicken. After marinating the meat in the wine for about 10 minutes, the wine became a bit caramelised and I tried the whole thing and it was DELICIOUS. I added a few leaves of basil for freshness on top. Carbs like rice can be added as an accompaniment.

Conclusion: money saved, leftovers saved, planet saved! :D

Molten Chocolate Heart (with ricotta cheese)

I had this ricotta cheese in my fridge for aaages and didn't know what to do with it. Ricotta is a creamy cheese that doesn't have a strong flavour, like Philadelphia spread. Both are used a lot to make cheesecakes; but I wanted to do something different, so went for a warm chocolate cake with a crispy shell and liquid centre. I used up a leftover butter and two leftover eggs, added a 200g dark chocolate bar, the same quantity in sugar, and a sprinkle of flower (optional). The cake can be either low or fluffed up by a teaspoon of baking soda (I chose the latter). I cooked the cake in the oven for 20 minutes. The result was... oh...my...god. I should say oh my cake, really!