Show 300, December 1, 2018: Food Journalist Lindsay-Jean Hard, Cooking With Scraps – Turn Your Peels, Cores, Rinds, And Stems Into Delicious Meals

Lindsay-Jean HurdThe statistics are grim: Americans currently produce 133 pounds of food waste every year, and 40 percent of food in this country goes uneaten. For the first time ever, the USDA has set a nationwide goal to reduce food waste by 50 percent by the year 2030. Lindsay-Jean Hard’s Cooking with Scraps – Turn Your Peels, Cores, Rinds, Stems and other Odds and Ends into Delicious Meals (Workman Publishing, $19.95, October 30, 2018) provides 85 creative, delicious, and inspired recipes to help home cooks meet this important goal.

By learning the basics behind transforming food waste into treasure, readers can take advantage of ingredients such as outdated produce, cheese rinds, stale bread, and other oft-discarded foods to create budget-conscious, sustainable, and highly satisfying meals.

Lindsay-Jean explains the rationale behind her choices in the recipes: “What lies unused in one’s fridge or pantry is not a purposeless object destined for the waste bin! For the most part, you’ll find recipes for the often unused parts—I’m assuming that if you buy carrots you already know how to use the carrot’s root, but you might not know how to make use of the greens—but every now and then I’ll touch on how to incorporate the whole item. For an ingredient to make it into the book, it had to be “worth it” to me as a scrap. For example, when buying broccoli, generally enough of the stem is sold along with it that it makes sense to put it to use, but you won’t find a recipe focused around ginger peels, because not only does it not really need to be peeled, but even if you do peel it, you won’t generate enough of it at one time to turn into something else.”

“Lindsay-Jean Hard received her Master’s in Urban Planning from the University of Michigan. Her education and passion for sustainability went on to inform and inspire her work in the garden, home, and community. The seeds of this book were planted in her Food52 column of the same name. Today she works to share her passion for great food and great communities as a marketer at Zingerman’s Bakehouse. She lives, writes, loves, and creates in Ann Arbor, Michigan.”

We’ll meet Lindsay-Jean.

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