Four pounds of cheese.

No, despite my near addiction to all things dairy, I am not actually referring to the amount of cheese that I am likely to consume in a single sitting. What that weighty amount of dairy goodness does represent is the amount of cheese thrown out by the average American over the course of a year, according to an article in the July, 2011 issue of National Geographic, entitled How to Feed A Growing Planet. That article, in turn, inspired my friend Jenni to start the Four Pounds of Cheese project – an experiment where participants would document, for a week, just what it was they were wasting, food-wise. Having been brought up to the tune of my mother’s “waste not, want not” mantra, I am programmed to abhor waste. That doesn’t mean that I’m not capable of wasting food with the best of them. It does, however, mean that I’ll feel dreadfully guilty when I do. Needless, to remark, I was keen to join in.

Last Monday, the week of waste watching began and it didn’t get off to a great start.

I ate out for lunch and the salmon I ordered was served in the classic Irish manner, meaning it came with two kinds of potato (mashed and roasted, in this case). Despite a valiant effort, I didn’t manage to clear my plate, so, to my shame, the very first thing I managed to waste were some of those selfsame spuds. And then I did what I suspect many of us do: I ordered dessert anyway. Different compartment, right? Surprise, surprise, I couldn’t finish that either. Sheesh. Waste 1, Spud 0.

Too many potatoes, even for me

Tuesday, for a while, looked like it might go the same way. In a clear case of trying to do too many things at once, I managed to burn what would otherwise have been a perfectly good batch of biscotti. After much cursing, followed by a bout of mature consideration, I decided that, though not my best work, they were still ok to eat. Waste 0, Spud 1.

My batting average for the rest of the week did improve greatly, but only because the exercise forced me to do more forward planning in terms of my food purchases, especially anything perishable. I am often guilty of buying the equivalent of my own bodyweight in fruit and vegetables, some of which are inevitably past their best before they get used, if they get used at all.

I also thought twice about other items that might more usually get thrown down the sink, so I found myself using milk that had soured to make scones, saving vegetable cooking liquid for stock and freezing the undrunk remains of a bottle of red to use for sauces. I also took to exploring the far reaches of my cupboards to see what might lurk therein. Thank goodness for the long shelf life of dried beans and pulses, because several not-quite-empty bags of lentils made for large batch of dinner-time dal.

All in all, then, not a great deal went to waste over the course of the week, so bully for me. I am, however, acutely aware of the fact that I’ll have wasted my time if I don’t try to keep it up.

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Cheesy Cauliflower Pie

Don’t panic, this recipe does not contain four pounds of cheese – four ounces, more like – but I wanted to include it, as it’s really a template for a pie to which you could add whatever cheese and vegetables you have on hand.

It’s based on a recipe I found in Eveleen Coyle’s Irish Potato Cookbook and it was the potato crust that caught my eye. No pastry here, but a crust composed of grated potato, grated onion and egg – an excellent gluten-free alternative for any savoury pie.

I have jazzed the original recipe up by roasting the cauliflower and adding gorgonzola and walnuts, though vary it with whatever vegetables and cheese you have around.

You’ll need:

• 1 potato crust (see recipe below) or use a shortcrust pastry lining, baked blind for about 10-15 minutes before filling
• 500g cauliflower, washed and separated into small florets
• 1 tblsp olive oil
• 50g walnuts
• butter for frying
• 1 small onion, about 100g, finely chopped
• pinch of salt
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 1 tsp fresh thyme leaves
• 50g mature cheddar, grated
• 50g gorgonzola
• 4 large eggs
• 100ml milk
• freshly ground black pepper
• 3 tblsp grated parmesan

You’ll also need:

• A 24cm round ovenproof dish, about 4cm deep, and a couple of baking trays (mine were about 20cm x 30cm)

The Steps:

• Preheat your oven to 200C, prepare and bake the potato crust as below.
• While the potato crust is baking, toss the cauliflower florets with the olive oil, spread them out on a baking tray, place in the oven and roast for about 15 minutes, until starting to soften and char very slightly.
• Spread the walnuts out on another baking tray and place in the oven for 5 minutes to lightly toast. Remove and chop roughly.
• Once the pie crust, cauliflower and walnuts are done, turn the oven down to 180C.
• Place a small frying pan over a medium heat and, when hot, add about a teaspoon of butter. When the butter has melted, add the chopped onion and a pinch of salt. Stir and fry for about 5 minutes or until translucent. Add the chopped garlic and thyme, stir and fry for about a minute more, then remove from the heat.
• To assemble the pie, add the grated cheddar to the baked crust, followed by the cauliflower, fried onions and chopped walnuts. Crumble over the gorgonzola. Beat together the eggs and milk and pour over the vegetables and cheese. Add a few twists of black pepper and sprinkle over the grated parmesan.
• Return to the oven for about 25 minutes or until the eggs are set. If the edges of the crust are browning too much, cover with foil while cooking.
• Slice and serve warm with a green salad and perhaps a glass of wine.

The Variations:

• Really, you can vary the filling freely according to the vegetables and cheese that you have on hand.

The Results:

• Pie for 4-6 people

I do not like throwing food in the bin, I do not like it one little bit.

It feels like a defeat (boo!) when my perishables expire before I can put them to good use and, conversely, a victory (yay!) when I have successfully cooked and/or eaten my way through the latest contents of the fridge.

A recent survey conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tells me that I am by no means the only person who feels this way. 97% of people, when asked, said that they were bothered by food waste. Thing is though, almost half of those people confessed to doing little or nothing to prevent it. So, really, they can’t be that bothered by it, can they?

Perhaps the EPA’s Stop Food Waste campaign, which aims to heighten awareness among consumers and provide commonsense tips on how to avoid food waste, will prod more people into taking action.

At the launch of the campaign this week, some familiar foodie faces were on hand to lend both their support and their use-it-don’t-lose-it recipes.

Rachel Allen, with a little help from TV3's Aidan Cooney

As she whipped up a dumpling-topped pork casserole with consummate ease, Rachel Allen named soups, frittatas and casseroles as her top three use-up-what’s-in-the-fridgeables.

Kevin Thornton works his culinary magic

Michelin-starred Kevin Thornton talked about our skewed sense of value when it comes to food. We might baulk at paying top prices for, say, a prime whole fish, but if, as Kevin ably demonstrated, you can make a succession of dishes from all of its usable parts, that fish starts to seem not so expensive anymore.

Donal Skehan keeps things simple

While it is more than aspirational to expect the average consumer to start producing Thornton-style magic at home, Donal Skehan’s recipes are well within the reach of the masses. Give that young man a chicken and he’ll give you several days worth of easily made dinners, with a herby roast chicken providing the basis for subsequent pasta and noodle-based dishes, as well as chicken stock. It’s not a bad place to start if you want to become cannier about using all that is available to you, foodwise.

When all is said and done, though, I can’t help but wonder how much impact the Stop Food Waste campaign will really have. It is all very well to provide waste-aware tips and recipes, but the elephant in the room is the still-common perception that food is, and should be, a cheaply available commodity. It is something that comes to us conveniently packaged and is, ultimately, disposable. As we grow ever more distant from the source of our food, its real value to us becomes diminished. So perhaps we pay less attention than we should to getting the most out of the food we have. If we had a real connection to the people producing our food or if, indeed, we were producing it ourselves, we would be far less inclined to waste a single scrap.

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Quick Asian Noodle Soup

This is adapted from one of the recipes demonstrated by Donal Skehan at the Stop Food Waste launch and is based, he told us, on the idea of instant noodle pots as made by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall – a homemade (and significantly healthier) alternative to the pot noodle.

The execution couldn’t be simpler: soften some rice noodles with boiling water or stock, stir in your flavourings, vegetables and other ingredients et voilà. Of course it’s a good idea to chop or otherwise prepare and assemble all of the ingredients before you pour the water or stock over your noodles so that you can add them quickly without things getting too cold.

You’ll need:

• 1 tblsp dark soy sauce
• 1 tsp fish sauce
• 1.5 tsp honey
• 4 tsp lime juice
• 1 tsp tomato purée
• 0.5 tsp toasted sesame oil
• 1 tsp grated root ginger
• 1 clove garlic, grated
• 50g fine rice noodles
• 350ml boiling water or use chicken or vegetable stock
• 3 spring onions, finely sliced
• 3 tblsp chopped fresh coriander
• finely sliced fresh red chilli to taste (optional)
• approx. 75g Chinese cabbage (i.e. napa cabbage), finely shredded

You’ll also need:

• A pyrex or other heatproof bowl for putting the soup together.

The Steps:

• In a small bowl, mix together the soy sauce, fish sauce, honey, lime juice, tomato purée, toasted sesame oil, grated ginger and grated garlic.
• Place the noodles in your heatproof bowl and pour over the boiling water or stock.
• When the noodles are soft (probably around 2 minutes or so) stir in the soy sauce mixture along with the spring onions, chopped coriander and sliced chilli (if using), reserving some spring onions and coriander for garnish. Finally stir in the shredded Chinese cabbage. Serve scattered with the reserved spring onion and coriander.

The Variations:

• There are many things that you could stir into this as the mood takes you: shredded cooked chicken or pork; cooked prawns; or a plain 1-egg omelette, cut into ribbons. Lightly steamed slices of broccoli and/or mange tout would also work well, as would crushed toasted peanuts.

The Results:

• One substantial portion of noodle soup or two smaller ones.

Don’t laugh (well, maybe just a chuckle then…).

A few years ago, I signed up for weekly deliveries of organic veg. Great idea. A selection of in-season fruit and veg delivered to the door, locally sourced where possible. Fresh, good quality kitchen materials always on hand. What’s not to love about that?

So, week-in-week-out, the veg arrived on cue and I lunched and dined on the spoils and even made the occasional jar of pickle. Happy days. Sometimes, though, I would struggle to get through my weekly vegetable quota and, if I forgot to cancel subsequent deliveries in time, a certain degree of vegetable stock-piling would ensue. I would always attempt to work through the little vegetable mountain as best I could, given my deep-seated abhorrence of food waste. There were times, though, when it would get the better of me and I would soon start to feel oppressed by its continued presence. The ringleaders of this vegetable-led oppression were cabbage and his buddy turnip.

The Chief Oppressors

It’s not that I disliked either of these vegetables but, frankly, I found them a bit of a challenge. Fact was that they often managed to defeat me by virtue of sheer volume. I mean to say, a bloody great big head of red or white cabbage with only one or two of us to do the eating could mean cabbage for several days in a row. Not only that, but who was to say that another cabbage wouldn’t turn up on the doorstep again next week? My cabbage repertoire wasn’t all that extensive and there were only so many days in the week where you’d want mashed turnip. So it was that I began to greet the arrival of the weekly delivery with some trepidation because these two would, at times, feature quite a lot. Being local ‘n’ all.

Now, during this time, I did try to find new ways of dealing with my chief adversaries (like the happy discovery of cabbage stir-fried with caraway seeds and a surprisingly good dish combining turnip with yoghurt, tomato and cumin) but, in the end, I had to admit that I couldn’t keep up with the constant challenge. I scaled back my deliveries to once every two weeks and we have now achieved a nice little equilibrium, my organic vegetables and me.

I was reminded of all of this during the week when family events kept me away from the house for several days longer than planned. Having been gone for the best part of a week, I returned to find a veg delivery that had been languishing unattended by the door for days, to be added to the fairly plentiful stocks already lying unused indoors. Not only that, but local duo cabbage and turnip put in a joint appearance, lending weight to the chorus of veggies murmuring “you really should use me up, y’know”. However, I will be neither oppressed nor defeated this time. I will look to the suggestions from Carmel Somers of The Good Things Café in West Cork on how to spice up these two lowly Irish staples, as heard recently on Newstalk radio’s Foodtalk series. She suggests, among other things, cabbage with juniper and garlic and turnip matched with ginger in either soup, roasted or stewed form. So I reckon I’ll be tackling my excess with the aid of whatever I think my spice cupboard can throw at it, that way I can have my seasonal vegetables and eat them.

Hand over le fromage de la belle France qui s’appelle camembert …
I don’t care how … runny it is, hand it over with all speed!

John Cleese looks in vain for camembert (runny or otherwise) in Monty Python’s Cheese Shop sketch

I think it's a bit runnier than you'd like it, sir...

I was chatting the other day to someone who had spent some time living in France. They remarked to me that, having developed a liking for runny camembert, they used to put said cheese into the microwave in order to encourage it into a liquid state, an act which the locals looked upon as food crime of the highest order. (I, of course, imagine their indignation to have been accompanied by cries of “Mon Dieu!” and “Sacrebleu!” at the very least). The offence in this case was not the runniness of the cheese but the application of the microwave to the task which they probably rightly considered would destroy the subtleness of the camembert taste.

Ultimately, of course, food is a matter for our own personal tastebuds. The fact that I can’t think of sweet creamed rice without cringing doesn’t mean that there aren’t entire populations who like to eat it on a regular basis. However, we can, I suspect, agree that, if not exactly an indictable offence, it is unfortunate when perfectly good and tasty ingredients are transformed into something less than edible, most particularly where this happens in a restaurant where you expect the people in charge to know better.

Take the other day, where I ordered a piece of what was billed as tomato, spinach and ricotta lasange. It duly arrived and it did, as advertised, contain tomato, spinach and a bit of ricotta. It also sported onions, celery, courgette, red peppers, carrots that were firm and pieces of aubergine that were the wrong side of chewy, all in a tomato-based sauce that lacked any particular flavouring, apart from whatever had been imparted by the mess of vegetables therein.

Oh, I ate it alright – I was hungry and it wasn’t completely inedible – it just wasn’t very nice. It had all the hallmarks of that particular style of vegetarian food which results from a bafflement regarding what to do with a main course that doesn’t contain meat – the approach being to throw in every last one of the vegetables to hand and provide a big portion because at least that’ll fill the customer up. This is not at all uncommon but, in my book, it’s not ok from an establishment that has deliberately cultivated a foodie reputation and that I know can do infinitely better. I did go up to one of the staff afterwards to express my disappointment, hoping that it was just a temporary aberration and not an indication of general slide in standards. It also made me want to go right out and get the ingredients for Delia Smith’s sinfully tasty spinach and ricotta lasagne which is how spinach and ricotta lasagnes should be.

While I might not have wholly appreciated it as a child, though, I certainly know now where my mother was coming from. We were a large family (try 10 kids for size) and my parents both worked hard to put that food on the table for everyone. They also both came from large families themselves and, having been young adults during WW2 (or “The Emergency” as it was known in Ireland), knew all about privation and having to be economical with rations (though, somehow, being reminded of this never made that smoked haddock seem any more appetising…)

The sayings (and the substance behind them) have, however, left a lasting impression. I still clear my plate at dinner (though, admittedly, it’s easier when there’s no smoked haddock to contend with) and I have a deep-seated abhorrence of food waste, which I see far too often for my liking. It also means that I always feel obliged to eat my food experiments, even the ones that turn out to be less than stellar.

Last weekend, for example, saw my first attempt to make gluten-free bread. I’ll freely admit that I was winging it, as my cupboard, bulging though it was with flours, couldn’t precisely match any of the flour mix recipes I’d found. So I took a selection of flours and starches, added some xanthan gum and yeast, kneaded and waited for the bread rolls to react in the usual yeasty way, but they didn’t rise one little bit. I cooked them anyway and what came out of the oven had crusts of steel.

Crusty The Cornbread

The maize flour used in the mix meant that these solid little babies qualified as cornbread, if, er, rather more rigid on the outside than is usual for same. Having managed to break into one of the rolls, I did find that there was a lovely cornbread aroma and really quite a pleasant taste once you got past the serious crust chewing involved. I was still a bit daunted by the fact that I was going to have to chisel my way through the entire batch as resident sis, after the first sample or two, was steering well clear. In this round of Kitchen Idol, she was voting them off (and with good reason) while I, well, I simply couldn’t bring myself to throw them out..

It was then that it came to me, almost jedi-like: “Use the force microwave”. Normally bread and microwave should not cross paths for any more than a few seconds, unless you want to end up with a soggy mess. In this case, however, 40 seconds on a microwave high turned the bulletproof cornbread shield into a pleasantly chewy crust. This allowed me to (a) split the rolls without having to resort to a pickaxe and (b) relax in the knowledge that I would neither waste the cornbread nor want for something to accompany my bowls of chili for quite some time to come.