Product Description

This book is not about buying fresh, organic, sustainable, free-range ingredients. It is not about creating picture-perfect dishes or even super-healthy ones. It is not about wowing guests with slick menus and asymmetric flower arrangements. It's about the bit that comes afterwards, the bit about eating it all up. We Britons throw away 6.7 million tons of food a year - that's a third of all the food we buy, and a fifth of our total domestic waste. And about half of it could be eaten. Imagine saving several hundred pounds every year (about GBP20,000 over a lifetime) and creating a carbon saving equivalent to taking a fifth of all cars off the road. Amazingly, we could do both simply by eating up our leftovers instead of consigning them to methane-belching landfills. The French know how to do it, and our grandparents did too. In this timely and much-anticipated book, acclaimed writer and journalist Kate Colquhoun explains how to make the most of our food.Included are recipes for meat balls and fish cakes, simple stocks and soups, inventive rice and pasta dishes, and great British pies and pickles, as well as sensible ideas for spare egg yolks and whites, wrinkly fruit and veg, and stale bread and cakes. Kate tackles frequently asked questions such as whether it is OK to reheat rice and how much mould we can scrape off the jam, and shows how some well-chosen store cupboard basics can transform any leftover carrot or bacon rind into a satisfying meal. She also takes us on a weekly shop that steers clear of the misleading BOGOFs and ready meals that are the cause of so much of our national waste. Stylishly packaged and printed on 100% recycled paper, The Thrifty Cookbook will reconnect us with our kitchen, leaving us with more time on our hands, more cash in our pockets and more space in our fridges - not to mention a great big environmental brownie point.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13888 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Kate Colquhoun is the author of A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton, which was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and of Taste: A Biography of British Food. She reviews regularly for the Daily Telegraph and has written for The Times, the Financial Times, BBC History Magazine, Saga Magazine, The (RHS) Garden and Country Life Magazine. She lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Fantastic!
I love this book. Not only does it have loads of recipes and ideas for leftovers such as cottage pie,soups, salads, bakes etc.. but also has recipes for the basics such as sauces, marinades, pastry.
A wonderful book with recipes that don't require expensive ingredients and ones that I would actually like to make!

Beautiful and practical
This book looks lovely and the recipes are too. I loved the style of presenting recipes which essentially are about saving money in such a glamorous style. I am no cook and yet can use this book to make things from my fridge no problem as they are simply presented and use ingredients I know very imaginatively. Perfect for the credit crunch and just a great read too.

The most useful cook book I own
This book is all about how you actually cook day to day. It's so clear. Look in the fridge to see what you have. Go to the relevant chapter, and there you have lists of ideas for things you can do with it. So it's great for inspiring you to expand your usual repertoire of dishes.

I made gnocchi today for the first time ever, because of this book, (I have no idea what I would usually have done with the surplus of BOGOF potatoes my husband bought - a lot of mash probably) and it tasted amazing, and the children loved it.

I love this book so much that it is my bedtime reading at the moment!