BBQ without food waste

While our mouths water at the thought of smoky BBQ smells, let’s not forget to plan ahead for a BBQ without food waste. Here are some things to consider:

• Avoid over-ordering and/or over-preparing food.

• If you’re unsure as to how much to scale up, use the Save the Food guestimator to estimate how much food you will need to prepare.

• Source local foods that are in season. Find out more about the reasons to eat with the seasons.

• Salads are frequently a big source of waste. Try these salad dressing recipes from Donal Skehan to ensure that your salads taste too good to waste.

• Create innovative nibbles using overlooked foodstuffs. Try a delicious salad using the stalks of broccoli or flavour table water with pineapple or strawberry tops. Your savvy recipes might inspire others to consider food in a whole new way.

• Take pride in your home produce, even if it’s just some herbs and salad leaves.

• Serve food from bowls at the centre of the table and keep any dishes leftover for use the following day.

• Freeze any unused burger buns while they’re fresh. They can be toasted directly from the freezer at a later date.

• Make doggy bags for your guests. Your guests will be delighted to come away with something delicious to take home.

• Ashes should not be added to compost systems because they fill in air spaces and can suffocate your compost. More importantly, they are alkaline in nature and would upset the near neutral pH balance of the compost. However, ashes contain potassium, a valuable plant nutrient, and can be directly added to acidic soils at planting time to help increase fertility. Wood and peat ash are safest. Coal ashes may contain heavy metals and other toxins so they should not be used for gardening.

• Compost all food scraps or put them in a brown bin.

• Refrigerate leftovers and enjoy them the following day!

Photo by @danielcgold via Unsplash