Ikea cooking with scraps recipe book
Remember how I talked about making vegetable broth with kitchen scraps? Well, Ikea has now done me one (or many) better: They have a free, downloadable recipe book specifically about cooking with kitchen scraps.
I’ve given a quick look through this cookbook, and I admit it’s a mixed bag (but again, it’s free, so I don’t really mind that so much). The “scrappy skillet”, for example, is basically just “throw stuff into a skillet and mix it up with some eggs.” The no-waste omelette? Same. And the smoothie recipe is… well, it’s a smoothie, so it’s not something that’s particularly hard to do. Chuck a bunch of stuff in a blender, hit the power button and let it go. Vary to taste. Not something I need a recipe book for.
And some of these recipes are so involved, and require so many other ingredients, that I really question that idea that they turn on the idea of cooking with scraps. The banana peel chutney on shrimp alone, for example, feels like it would take me ages to shop for. I’m not interested in adding in one kitchen scrap out of several dozen other ingredients, plus adding a considerable amount of prep and cooking time to my meal. Sure, it’s great to be frugal and to use every scrap, but my time and happiness also have a premium to me, and it’s counterproductive to sacrifice those so I can use some leftover herb stems.
Some of these, though, do look interesting. The banana peel bacon? We eat a ton of bananas around here (tasty, healthy, cheap — what’s not to love), so I’m intrigued by that one. Ditto with the watermelon rind jam, since watermelon is one of my big summer treats. The vegetable stew also looks like a decent way to chuck a lot of leftover vegetables into a pot and make a meal out of them. And the plantcakes look like a sort of variation on okonomiyaki, one of my favorite Japanese recipes and one that I use often to, well, get rid of odds and ends of vegetable scraps and get a meal out of it.
Personally, I wouldn’t pay for a hard copy of this book. But yeah, sure, I’d download a free copy and give it a whirl.
