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The Thrifty Cookbook: 476 ways to eat well with leftovers
This book is not about buying fresh, organic, sustainable, free-range ingredients.
It is not about creating picture-perfect dishes or even super-healthy ones.
It is not about wowing guests with slick menus and asymmetric flower arrangements.
It’s about the bit that comes afterwards, the bit about eating it all up.
We Britons throw away 6.7 million tons of food a year – that’s a third of all the food we buy, and a fifth of our total domestic waste. And about half of it could be eaten.
Imagine saving several hundred pounds every year (about £20,000 over a lifetime) and creating a carbon saving equivalent to taking a fifth of all cars off the road. Amazingly, we could do both simply by eating up our leftovers instead of consigning them to methane-belching landfills.
The French know how to do it, and our grandparents did too. In this timely and much-anticipated book, acclaimed writer and journalist Kate Colquhoun explains how to make the most of our food. Included are recipes for meat balls and fish cakes, simple stocks and soups, inventive rice and pasta dishes, and great British pies and pickles, as well as sensible ideas for spare egg yolks and whites, wrinkly fruit and veg, and stale bread and cakes. Kate tackles frequently asked questions such as whether it is OK to reheat rice and how much mould we can scrape off the jam, and shows how some well-chosen store cupboard basics can transform any leftover carrot or bacon rind into a satisfying meal. She also takes us on a weekly shop that steers clear of the misleading BOGOFs and ready meals that are the cause of so much of our national waste.
Stylishly packaged and printed on 100% recycled paper, The Thrifty Cookbook will reconnect us with our kitchen, leaving us with more time on our hands, more cash in our pockets and more space in our fridges – not to mention a great big environmental brownie point.
It is not about creating picture-perfect dishes or even super-healthy ones.
It is not about wowing guests with slick menus and asymmetric flower arrangements.
It’s about the bit that comes afterwards, the bit about eating it all up.
We Britons throw away 6.7 million tons of food a year – that’s a third of all the food we buy, and a fifth of our total domestic waste. And about half of it could be eaten.
Imagine saving several hundred pounds every year (about £20,000 over a lifetime) and creating a carbon saving equivalent to taking a fifth of all cars off the road. Amazingly, we could do both simply by eating up our leftovers instead of consigning them to methane-belching landfills.
The French know how to do it, and our grandparents did too. In this timely and much-anticipated book, acclaimed writer and journalist Kate Colquhoun explains how to make the most of our food. Included are recipes for meat balls and fish cakes, simple stocks and soups, inventive rice and pasta dishes, and great British pies and pickles, as well as sensible ideas for spare egg yolks and whites, wrinkly fruit and veg, and stale bread and cakes. Kate tackles frequently asked questions such as whether it is OK to reheat rice and how much mould we can scrape off the jam, and shows how some well-chosen store cupboard basics can transform any leftover carrot or bacon rind into a satisfying meal. She also takes us on a weekly shop that steers clear of the misleading BOGOFs and ready meals that are the cause of so much of our national waste.
Stylishly packaged and printed on 100% recycled paper, The Thrifty Cookbook will reconnect us with our kitchen, leaving us with more time on our hands, more cash in our pockets and more space in our fridges – not to mention a great big environmental brownie point.
256 pages, Paperback
First published April 6, 2008
10 people are currently reading
44 people want to read
About the author
Kate Colquhoun
9 books24 followersKate Colquhoun is a biographer and historian. Her first book A Thing in Disguise: the visionary life of Joseph Paxton (Fourth Estate, 2003) was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper prize, nominated for the Samuel Johnson award and was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Other books include Taste: the history of Britain through its cooking (Bloomsbury, 2007) and The Thrifty Cookbook: 476 Ways to eat well with leftovers (Bloomsbury, 2009).
Mr Briggs’ Hat (Little, Brown, 2011) was shortlisted for a Crime Writers’ Association silver dagger award, translated widely and filmed for BBC TV. Her next book Did She Kill Him? (Little, Brown 2014), investigates the story of Florence Maybrick, an American ingénue tried for the murder of her older cotton-broker husband James in Liverpool in 1889.
Kate reviews and writes widely for the national papers, particularly the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph. She helped to make The Truth about Food for Channel 4’s Dispatches series, and appears often on radio and TV. She particularly loved teaching Faber Academy’s narrative non-fiction course in 2011. For her next project, Kate will investigate gender equality around the world, asking ‘How Equal is Almost Equal?’ She lives in west London with her two sons.
Mr Briggs’ Hat (Little, Brown, 2011) was shortlisted for a Crime Writers’ Association silver dagger award, translated widely and filmed for BBC TV. Her next book Did She Kill Him? (Little, Brown 2014), investigates the story of Florence Maybrick, an American ingénue tried for the murder of her older cotton-broker husband James in Liverpool in 1889.
Kate reviews and writes widely for the national papers, particularly the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph. She helped to make The Truth about Food for Channel 4’s Dispatches series, and appears often on radio and TV. She particularly loved teaching Faber Academy’s narrative non-fiction course in 2011. For her next project, Kate will investigate gender equality around the world, asking ‘How Equal is Almost Equal?’ She lives in west London with her two sons.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 6, 2020
Excellent ideas and great recipes.
This is a welcome addition to my cookbook shelf and one I know will return to regularly.
This is a welcome addition to my cookbook shelf and one I know will return to regularly.
February 13, 2015
Wwill revisit this book from time to time.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews