Have you ever noticed your chopping board while cutting the vegetables? If you have, then you must have noticed that every day we throw a major part of our vegetables in the waste-bin. Imagine, if we would have cooked those parts too, then what amount of food wastage would have lessened? That is what the world terms as ‘zero-waste cooking’. In the recent time, zero-waste cooking is something the chefs of the world are talking much about. Restaurants around the world waste several million tons of food every year. Even in every household, we cut off almost half of a vegetable we buy. Hence, zero-waste cooking is something that the world is looking up to. It is all about cooking every part of an ingredient, especially vegetables, we buy from the market.
Here we bring you a few of such vegetables which can be cooked without wasting a single part of it. Read on.
Also Read: Waste No More! 5 Ways To Reduce Food Waste, While Saving Money
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Zero-Waste Cooking: 4 Vegetables You Can Use Without Wasting A Bit:
1. Bottle Gourd (Lauki):
We generally peel off the skin of the gourd and throw it in the dustbin. Instead of doing that, what we can do is, chop it into thin pieces and deep fry it with nigella seeds (kalonji) and salt. Lauki skin fry tastes incredible with steamed rice and ghee. It is a very common food in a Bengali house-hold. Even lauki’s leaves and stems are edible. Like Sarso or palak, lauki saag also taste really good.
2. Cauliflower:
Although it is one of the tastiest vegetables of winter, we throw more than fifty per cent of it or feed it to cows and other animals. That’s a good thing; but if you throw stalk of cauliflower off, then hold on. Again just chop them in pieces, steam them a bit and make a sabzi (mish-mash) with it. Try and cook the sabzi with some mustard paste. Surely, it will not fail to satisfy your taste buds.
3. Potato:
It is said that potato is such a vegetable that can go with anything and everything. It is the most neutral of all the vegetables in the market. If potato is so, then how can its skin be far behind? Finely chop the potato skins and deep fry them. You can use that crispy potato skin to garnish and add crunch to any dish.
Also Read: Watch: Potato Peel Dish Wows MasterChef India Judges, Recipe Gets 73 Million Views
4. Raw Banana:
We use raw bananas to make various kinds of vegetables in various parts of India. But did you know the peel can also be used to make very tasty koftas? Just boil the peels with some salt and turmeric powder (haldi), then grind it into a paste (it will be a coarser paste). Add chopped onion, ginger, chilli, coriander leaves, some maida (all-purpose flour) and sooji (semolina). Mix all the ingredients well with the paste and fry kofta out of it. It will give a very earthy taste to the kofta.
Bonus Tips:
Other than these, there are several other vegetables, skins and ends of which can be stored to make vegetable broth. Some such vegetables are carrots, turnips, bell peppers, leeks, celery roots, onions, garlic, Mushrooms, herbs and more. All you need to make that broth are the vegetable scraps and water.
From now on, you can actually consider giving a second thought before throwing the peels of the vegetables.
