Small Habits, Big Difference

There is a particular kind of guilt that comes with emptying a drawer of forgotten vegetables into the bin, or tipping away a tub of something that was perfectly good a week ago. Most of us know the feeling. The good news is that cutting food waste rarely requires a grand plan or a new gadget. It comes down to a handful of habits, repeated often enough that they become second nature — and most of them are things our grandparents did without thinking.

What follows is a practical set of routines for the British kitchen, aimed at the sort of cooking we actually do: roast dinners, soups, traybakes, and whatever the garden has decided to give us this week.

Store It Like You Mean It

Where food goes when it comes through the door makes more difference than almost anything else. A few specifics worth adopting:

• Potatoes belong in a paper bag in a cool, dark cupboard — never the fridge, where the cold turns starch to sugar and gives them a sweet, gritty texture. Keep them well away from onions; the gases each gives off make the other sprout.
• Onions want air and darkness, so a hanging basket or a mesh bag in a cupboard is ideal. Once cut, wrap the remainder and use it within a couple of days.
• Bread goes stale fastest at room temperature and moulds fastest in the fridge. Slice it, freeze it, and toast from frozen. A whole loaf keeps far better in the freezer than on the counter.
• Soft herbs such as parsley and coriander last for a fortnight if you treat them like flowers: stems in a jar of water, a loose bag over the top, in the fridge door. Hardy herbs like rosemary and thyme prefer a damp sheet of kitchen paper in a lidded box.
• Salad leaves keep longer with a piece of kitchen paper in the bag to soak up condensation. Swap the paper when it gets soggy.
• Cheese breathes. Greaseproof paper or a beeswax wrap beats cling film, which traps moisture and encourages the wrong kind of mould.
• Eggs are best left in their box, in the main body of the fridge rather than the door, where the temperature swings every time you open it.

The Soup Bag in the Freezer

This is the single most useful habit I can pass on. Keep a large bag or tub in the freezer, and every time you cook, add the trimmings: carrot tops and peelings, mushroom stalks, celery leaves, the leafy tops of leeks, cauliflower and broccoli stalks, parsley stalks, pea pods, tomato cores, the ends of onions.

Leave out anything muddy, anything mouldy, and onion skins, which turn stock bitter. When the bag is full, tip the lot into a pan with cold water, a bay leaf and a few peppercorns, bring it gently to a simmer and let it bubble quietly for forty minutes. Strain it and you have a free, deeply savoury stock — the base of every soup, risotto and casserole you make for the next fortnight. It costs nothing but a little time.

Leftovers Worth Looking Forward To

The trick with leftovers is to decide what they are going to become before they go in the fridge, so they don't sit there waiting for inspiration that never arrives.

• A roast chicken carcass becomes stock. Add the stripped meat to a pie, a curry or a bowl of noodles.
• Sunday roast vegetables — potatoes, parsnips, carrots — fry into bubble and squeak, or fold into a frittata with a handful of cheese.
• Stale bread blitzes into breadcrumbs for toppings, cubes into croutons, or soaks into a summer pudding or a panzanella.
• Wrinkly vegetables are perfect for soup, roasting, or a chutney when you have a glut.
• Soft fruit stews into compote for porridge, or freezes in bags for crumbles in January.
• Leftover rice should be cooled quickly and refrigerated straight away, then reheated thoroughly in a stir-fry the next day — never left lukewarm on the hob.

Garden Gluts, Handled Calmly

Kitchen gardeners know the rhythm: nothing for weeks, then four kilos of courgettes in a fortnight. Sow little and often rather than all at once, and pick regularly — beans and courgettes especially will keep cropping if you don't let them swell into marrows.

When the glut arrives anyway, deal with it the day you pick it. Grate courgettes and freeze in 200g portions for fritters and cakes. Blanch runner beans for two minutes, cool them in iced water, dry and freeze. Roast tomatoes with garlic and oil, then freeze as a rough passata. Freeze soft fruit on a tray first so the berries stay separate, then bag them. Chop herbs into ice cube trays, top with oil, and freeze — instant flavour for winter cooking.

A Weekly Rhythm That Sticks

Once a week, before you shop, spend ten minutes with the fridge door open. Move anything that needs eating to a shelf at eye level — an "eat me first" spot — and build two or three meals around it. Check the freezer soup bag while you're there.

Finally, learn to trust your senses over the label. Use by dates are about safety and are worth heeding. Best before dates are about quality, and a carrot that snaps, a pear that smells sweet and a cheese without fur on it are all perfectly good eating, however the packaging feels about it.