Lots Of Cooking Scraps? Here’s What To Do With Them

With fewer trips to the grocery store and more cooking at home during the stay-at-home order, it’s likely that you’ve found yourself with more odds and ends leftover from the cooking process.

A banana peel here, a kale stem there — it can add up to a lot of waste over time. But by changing your mindset from looking at them as scraps to ingredients in their own right, you can stretch your dollar and save a lot of waste, said Lindsay-Jean Hard, author of “Cooking With Scraps.”

“It really takes us stopping and thinking and re-evaluating,” she said. “Is this edible? What could I be doing with it? Because not only are most of these parts edible, they really are delicious, too.”

Hard shared a few recipes and ideas for what to do with some common food scraps.

Coffee Grounds

Likely one of the most common scraps to have around the house is coffee grounds. Even after brewing, they pack a lot of flavor, she said.

Hard likes to mix them with ground cashews to make a nut butter, but you can use whatever nuts you prefer or have on hand.

“It adds not only coffee flavor, but a little bit of texture,” she said. “You can also use coffee grounds to infuse flavor into things like milk or cream, and then you could make whipped cream that’s coffee flavored.”

Apple Peels And Cores

The cores and peels still hold a lot of flavor. Hard recommends drying the peels to make apple chips for snacking, or cooking down the cores in a sugar syrup to flavor beverages, such as tea.

“Or you can keep boiling it down and turn it into an apple flavored syrup that you could use on pancakes,” she said.

One part you want to steer clear of — the seeds.

Kale Stems

If the stems are too tough for the recipe you’re making, Hard said to set them aside to put in kale stem hummus.

Cook the kale stems in a pot of boiling water until they’re soft, about 45 minutes, then blend in a food processor with chickpeas, garlic, tahini, salt and lemon juice.

“You would never guess that you have these kale stems blended into it and it just adds a little bit of extra fiber into it,” she said.

Banana Peels

It may surprise you, but yes, you can eat banana peels, Hard said.

“You really just need to soften them up a little bit and then they can be pureed,” she said. “Think of it almost like adding apple sauce into a quick bread.”

Put leftover banana peels in smoothies, Hard said, or make Banana Peel Cake with Peanut Butter Frosting.