Food Saving and Repurposing Ideas

I don’t fancy being wasteful, so I am always compelled to make use of what I have in my kitchen before it goes bad. Although I must admit, as my husband points out, to avoid pitching $2 worth of ingredients, I will end up spending a lot more in time,  and additional ingredients, just  to save the one item that is about to expire. But that is beside the point...although he makes a good point.  Well, this weekend I was in this food saving mood, as that carton of buttermilk that was still sitting unopened in my refrigerator was begging to get utilized. So I decided to make homemade buttermilk pancakes, which the kids enjoyed with Nutella and/or real maple syrup. I made enough that they also had some for breakfast on Monday.  Pancake breakfast on a school morning is always a special treat.  

And while I was on this baking kick, I thought, why not use the remaining buttermilk to make fresh biscuits? And so everyone enjoyed one (or two..) for brunch with smoked salmon, avocados, grape tomatoes, baby greens, eggs (boiled or poached).

 But I wasn’t done yet!  You may have seen me post various assortments of cereal treats on my Facebook page "Kitchening with Francesca", and the reason being is that there is always leftover cereal at my house that nobody wants to consume, and rather than wasting it, I always enjoy experimenting with it to make treats. And most of the times they turn out good enough to eat :o) In fact, on this last round of experimenting, the chocolate chip soft bake cookies were such a hit with the kids, that they were gone by the next day.  For these, I adapted a chocolate chip cookie recipe by substituting some of the flour with flour obtained from organic oat and marshmallow cereal (all I did I put the cereal in a food processor (or vitamix blender) and reduced it to powder.  Because I used cereal which was already sweet, I of course used less sugar than the recipe called for.   For the whole grain granola treats, I used a mixture of raisin bran and granola, but the recipe is a bit more involved, so I will save that for another time. But I can assure you that not much is left of those couple dozen whole grain treats.

In the meantime, go ahead and experiment, and feel free to share your results.  

Happy saving, happy baking, happy savoring.