Waste not want not

This is a saying that my father often spoke when we had some food that was left over or perhaps when food was a little bit substandard. My father was a keen gardener and when you have laboured with love over your vegetable patch loath are you to dispose of that food, if remotely edible!

Lately I have been very fortunate to receive an abundance of food thank Steve Z. Skowyrski for that. It would appear that Xmas is a time of abundance in food stores, but so is the danger of stocking the wrong things.

Carrots were a big over stocked item this year so it seems with literally 100's of kilo's finding their way into the "past sell by date" category. Now there are only so many carrots you can eat isn't there? ... well I have seen some impressive substitutions going including Carrots instead of tomatoes in chilli or spaghetti bolonaise. I've had my fill of carrot juice as well... I think I'm taking on an orange tinge now! ... substitute for tanning products?

So this afternoon... would you eat this carrot?

This is a pretty typical end for a carrot that is well past it's sell by date and then some. They begin getting black spots and then this grows covering the entire carrot.

Now although not the most appetising of things this is normally just a surface covering and has not worked it's way through the carrot entirely... so what does it look like when we have got to work peeling it?

Well remarkably Mr. Carrot scrubs up pretty good...

So I took to the bag of carrots that I had received to see what could be done... and actually the results were pretty awesome. Turns out that a heap of carrots that to the regular person in the street would have been consigned to landfill, or at best the recycling bin, can actually still be eaten.

Now ordinarily you might say well carrots are 30p a kilo or so at this time of the year, I will just go buy some more. But we already have carrots here and they are perfectly edible, with a bit of extra work... Freezing is also an option for when they are more expensive. But here is the question, if starving, this could mean the difference between life and death, so the humble carrot, why throw it away?

What do you do though with a pile of carrots? 

There are many uses for carrots... and even if you don't like the taste they can be blended and added to a wide variety of dishes and soups without actually being "seen" ... tip for those catering for fussy eaters.

What I've made apart from some Carrot and Coriander and Carrot and Caraway Seed soups is a kind of carrots slaw.

Finely slice the carrot, I got my cheapy food processor out of storage for this one... after 7 years of julienne carrots without a food processor I think I've died and gone to heaven... why on earth did I not rescue this from the top of the kitchen cupboards before... god send or what!

Added 3 chubby garlic cloves, mashed in my trusty humongous "pestle & mortar" (another god send) and then mixed these along with 6 or so good spoonfuls of Polish Mayonnaise (where has this been all my life) ...

The result... a dish so tasty I will have trouble keeping my lodgers "cabbage pickers" (hands) off it I can see that!  And it gets more tasty the longer it is in the fridge... where are those other old carrots... another batch beckons soon! ... food waste? Don't do it!!