"Recycling" food

So much food is wasted every day in the world that it makes me cringe every time I have to add to the pile of wasted food and throw away something that has spoiled. Luckily, there are ways to “recycle” food at home, and by this I mean turning leftovers into something delicious preventing spoilage or – better yet – turning something you didn’t think you could eat anymore into something completely good to eat.

Bread is often a difficult case: you put it in a plastic bag and it gets moldy soon, or you put it in the fridge in a plastic bag and it gets moldy a little bit slower but it doesn’t taste as good as it did before. Then you leave it on the countertop in a paper bag and it gets dry even if keeping away the mold. To keep bread tasting great after a longer period of time or to avoid wasting it, I often freeze extra bread that I know I won’t be able to eat in time. If the bread gets moldy, there’s nothing to be done – mold secretes enzymes and chemicals into the bread in order for it to absorb the nutrients; great for the fungus, but not very helpful, nor healthy, for humans. But, if the bread is free of mold and only becoming dry, then I do have a trick to offer, which I use quite often.

I learned this from my mother when I was growing up: you can make French toast! Or “poor knights” as they are called in Finland (go figure…).  My version is of a healthy kind – I’m keeping my promise to only include healthy foods in this blog even if I have quite the sweet tooth myself. 

So what I do is I first drench the dried up bread (whole grain, of course) in milk or almond milk. I haven’t tried juices yet, but they might also work. When the bread has softened up (takes a few minutes or so), I put them in a frying pan that I have sprayed over with a little bit of canola oil (contains plenty of good fats) and heat until they are golden brown. Lastly, I put some garnish on these “poor knights”, my favorite being apple sauce without added sugar. Anything you fancy works well, such as jam or maple syrup, but for some reason the healthy option has tasted the best to me.

If you have great ideas about making use of dried up bread or any other food items in order to avoid waste, I would love to hear about them! It is good for both your budget and the nature to not waste food!

I hope you enjoyed my post!

Love,

Anna-Kaisa