The freezer is your friend: tips and recipes to save money and reduce food waste

Stop Food Waste Day and Earth Month just passed, but for the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s Sustainability Department, every day is Stop Food Waste Day. Here are some tips and recipes to reduce food waste.

Tip #1: The freezer is your friend! Food can be stored longer in the freezer than in the refrigerator. If you have more food than you can eat, freeze the raw ingredients and cook them in small portions at a time when you want to eat them. Or cook it all and freeze the extra. Shopping and cooking for one person can be even more difficult, so be sure to freeze anything you don’t use or eat right away, and you’ll be amazed at how much you can save on food (and money).

Bonus tip: Purchase a vacuum sealer to keep them fresh even longer in the freezer. It may seem expensive, but it will reduce food waste and save you money in the long run.

Tip #2: Replace fresh fruits and vegetables with equally nutritious frozen fruits and vegetables. Fresh fruits and vegetables often go bad much faster than other food items. Choosing the option of freezing fresh produce can significantly reduce the amount of food that ends up spoiling. Frozen foods have come a long way in recent years, and there are no limits to the types of foods you can buy and store in your freezer.

Tip #3: I save all my vegetable scraps and eventually make homemade vegetable stock. Refrigerate roots, skins, cores, stalks, and all leftovers in a Tupperware container, and when you have enough, dump the contents into a pot of boiling water and simmer to create your own delicious vegetable stock. Filter until done.

Tip #4: If you don’t try, you’ll never learn. Take a cooking class on your own or as a couple to try new dishes and try new recipes. If you’re cooking chicken, learn how to break it down yourself. By cooking at home, you can save a lot of money in the long run and learn memorable skills that will be useful for the rest of your life. If you don’t want to pay tuition fees, the internet has everything you need to become a skilled cook.

Be careful about how much you eat. Not everything needs to be supersized. We all want convenience, but once we have food, we often don’t care about anything else. Consider what happens next and try to compost your food scraps if possible. When ordering food, try to reduce the amount of packaging waste. We tend to think about how our choices affect ourselves, but not how our choices affect the environment.

If you want to reduce food waste, save money, and benefit the environment, use the advice in this article and check out Yes Chef. They offer affordable, nutritious, subscription-free heating and meals, and recently opened a cafe in his first-floor lobby of the SMC Campus Center (621 W. Lombard St.). With a changing menu and a variety of options, there’s something for everyone. Below are some recipes written by our chef himself that are useful for preventing food waste.

3 delicious recipes to help fight food waste

Banana Bread UMB: Don’t throw away old bananas. Uneaten brown bananas are perfect for making banana bread.

Bread Pudding UMB: Don’t throw away old bread. Hard bread is recommended for bread pudding.

Tofu dish: Even if you’re not vegan/vegetarian, this recipe is a good addition for anyone trying to reduce their meat intake. Reducing meat consumption is not only good for your health, it can also benefit the environment.