The holidays mean lots of food, and what you eat could take a toll on your waistline, but what you don’t eat can take a toll on your bottom line. In tonight’s Dollars and Sense, Lynn Martinez talks with a chef who has some tasty ways to save money.
We throw away $165 billion in food every year.
Chef Michael Love: “Everybody has leftover food, not just leftover food from what they cooked, but what about what they bought that they didn’t use?”
Chef Michael Love from Epicure Gourmet Market deals with food waste every day.
Chef Michael Love: “The butcher shop came to me, asked me if I could do anything with a lot of excess chicken that they had left over, and I made a chicken meat loaf out of it.”
Now, he’s sharing all of the tricks he’s learned at Epicure in his cookbook, “The Salvage Chef,” filled with dozens of creative recipes for your leftovers.
Chef Michael Love: “It’s really designed to teach people how to use the ingredients they have in their refrigerator, in their pantries, on their counter and make it into delicious food.”
Meats, potatoes and sauces are some of the most common foods tossed in the trash, costing you thousands.
Chef Michael Love: “If you can incorporate the ingredients that you already bought, you already paid for it and you already cooked half of it. You might as well learn how to use it.”
Everyone has leftover turkey after the holidays.
Chef Michael Love: “You may not want to have turkey four or five days in a row. But, if you can make it into something really interesting, then you can continue having hearty meals for your family for weeks to come.”
That stuffing was expensive. Don’t trash it! Transform it.
Chef Michael Love: “I’ve got a very unique dish called the “Stuffle,” where you take stuffing and put it in a waffle iron with some ingredients.”
Don’t put open wine to waste. Chef Love has an entire section on leftover libations.
Chef Michael Love: “Usually it’s that, ‘Oh my God, like I can’t believe this came out of [that].'”
It’s all about creating new meals with the leftovers, and the options in your kitchen are endless.
Chef Michael Love: “Almost every area of your refrigerator has something left over.”
Cutting not only your food waste, but cutting your spending, too.
Chef Michael Love: “Providing great meals for our families, but we’re saving a ton of money. You save $10 here and $10 there. It does add up.”
Chef Love will be at the Miami Book Fair showing off “The Salvage Chef” this weekend on Nov. 22 and 23. You can also get the cookbook at any Epicure market or order it online.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
http://www.epicuremarket.com/epicure-with-love/chef-michael-love/
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/