When life gives you lemons (and orange cordial), make (orangey) G&Ts. Then re-use the lemons. |
I’ve always been a bit competitive about food
and drink. The number of times a waiter has looked at me in a restaurant and
said, ‘Are you sure you want to order all that? It’s a lot for one
person to eat.’ And I’ve puffed up my chest in response and said, ‘Just watch
me.’
When I was in my twenties, I got into a Guinness
drinking competition with a Geordie man twice my size and I won. True, I
was so ill later that night I gave up drinking alcohol for five months. But I
won! And that’s all that matters. What I’m saying is, had I been born American,
there’s no doubt in my mind I’d be a champion pie eater. I’d probably have to
get around on one of those mobility scooter things. But I’d definitely be state
champion.
As it happens, I’m not an American. I’m a middle-aged
English woman who lives in rural Bulgaria, where there isn’t a lot of scope for
competitive eating. Which is perhaps why I’m so competitive about leftovers.
Yes, leftovers. It’s a source of personal pride
that I can make something tasty out of pretty much any leftovers, and we almost
never throw things away. A bit of unused ketchup in a bowl becomes the basis of
a chilli sauce for falafel. A couple of handfuls of leftover cooked lentils gets
turned into a mustardy lentil salad. Chickpea cooking water goes in a jar in
the fridge to make future mayonnaise-like sauces. The dill vinegar from an
empty jar of cornichons gets saved for dressings. We laugh in the face of
expiry dates.
You get the idea. In our house, throwing away
edible items is a sign of weakness. But lockdown life has taken this
competitive thriftiness to a whole new level. Even though we have a decent supermarket within 10 miles of our house, and we’re generally shopping
for food every two or three weeks, I’m acting like we may never see another
food shop again. In my head, every wasteful scrap put in the bin or on the compost
heap will surely lead to future starvation. I am, in short, a bit more mental
than usual.
For example, I mentioned before how we’ve been
freezing sliced lemons, thus ensuring a constant supply for G&Ts. That’s a
good thrifty tip, you may say. No, it’s not thrifty enough, the new, improved, slightly-more-mental
me would reply. So I’ve taken to fishing the used lemons out of our empty
G&T glasses and keeping them in the fridge to be used again. Turns
out the finely chopped, G&T-soaked rind is lovely in everything from pasta
sauces to risottos to houmous.
Then we made a dozen fruit buns for Easter
weekend. What we should have done was halve the recipe, because 12 buns is obviously
too many for two people, even two gluttons like us. Pretty soon they were
turning stale, and we still had six buns left. I was livid at our feckless wastefulness.
And so we spent our Easter Sunday morning picking out the sultanas and
cranberries and whizzing up the stale buns to make sweet, spicy breadcrumbs –
that were used later in the day, with walnuts from the garden, to make a festive
nut roast.
First they were buns. Then they went stale. Then they were resurrected into a nut roast. #EasterFoodParables |
But I think I hit a new high (or low,
depending on your viewpoint) yesterday. I’d chopped some onions and carrots for
a lentil thing I was making, and I had the peelings and dirty dog-end bits in a
bowl ready for the compost heap. That bowl did not look appetising. But every
time I looked at it, my brain would scream, ‘DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE THROW THOSE
BITS AWAY.’ You can guess what happened next, can’t you? I spent the rest of
the morning making vegetable stock from the peelings, which then became veg and
lentil soup, using some of the lentils I’d cooked for lunch.
This is all very admirable, but my God it’s a
drain on my time. I reckon I’m spending 90% of my waking life finding new and
inventive ways to use lemon rind and onion peelings. When my freelance work
returns to normal levels, I genuinely don’t know how I’ll find the time to fit
it in. The work, that is.