...to be eating cauliflower, parsnips, potatoes, celeriac and purple sprouting broccoli. Fruit fans should wrap their chops around British apples and pears.
A tasty veg curry and some baked fruit sound pretty good to us.
You can find more recipes and tips for reducing food waste at Love Food Hate Waste, and up to date information on what's in season at Eat The Seasons.
Fancy something different to an overpriced heart shaped pizza in a restaurant packed to the rafters with shiny balloons this year? Then look no further, because this Valentine's weekend, our friends at food charity FareShare are collaborating with Forgotten Feast and their eco-chef Tom Hunt to produce a unique 3 course banqueting experience – Valentines for Everyone.
For £40 you'll get a fantastic 3 course feast of delicious but unwanted food that might otherwise end up in landfill. Not because there's something wrong with it, but because too much was ordered, it was in the wrong packaging or it was just a bit wonky.
Vegetarians and meat eaters will both be catered for and everyone will sit together for the feast, so even if you don't have a date you won't have to dine alone. The banquet will be held in FareShare’s east London warehouse, and every ticket sold will enable FareShare to provide an additional 80 meals for the hungry and vulnerable people they support, thanks to grant-giving charity StreetSmart who are generously matching the number of meals raised though ticket sales. FareShare rescues surplus food year round and delivers it to local charities all over the country.
Tickets are available for dinner Friday 10th February, Saturday 11th, Sunday 12th (late lunch) and for dinner on Valentine’s Day itself and include 3 courses, a drink and canapés. Get them here.
And to see the work we've been doing recently to prevent perfectly good fruit from going to waste then take a look at our taste not waste project here.
Feedback Madagascar is one of the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that we support.The project we support promotes yam farming with training on yam cultivation techniques, the creation of demonstration plots and household plantations. Working with twelve community forest management associations, over 250 people are already producing and yams are taking off.
Famous for providing the fuel for Usain Bolt’s sprinting successes, the yam is commonly confused as a sweet potato (they are un-related), they are similar in properties.
“Anyone for yams?”
The project is based around the Malagasy rainforest, where people are reliant on inadequate rice and cassava harvests; the cultivation of yams reduces the impact of the annual famine and dramatically ups people’s nutritional intake.
And yams are fun. To raise awareness of yams and their benefits, alongside rainforest conservation, there are now yam festivals. Associations take stands, organise competitions, cook offs, speeches and full-on carnival singing and dancing.
As part of the project, training on culinary techniques is included to make the most of the yam.
Here are 6 of their suggested recipes:
- Yam Pudding
- Yam Crisps
- Yam Pizza
- Yam Soup
- Yam salad
- Baked Yam.
Here in Fruit Towers, we think they all sound delicious and the soup sounds like a great defence against winter.
If you fancy trying your hand at Yam Pudding, here is an embellished Western version:
Ingredients:
800g grated uncooked yams
300g milk
120g golden syrup
3 eggs
2 tablespoons butter or margarine
120g brown sugar
1tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp salt
½ tsp ground nutmeg
- Preheat oven to 160˚c
- Grease baking dish (approx 8”x8”x2”)
- Combine all ingredients
- Bake until a knife comes out of mixture clean, approx 1 hour.
- Serve warm with cream or ice cream
For more information on Feedback Madagascar, please visit our foundations page: www.innocentfoundation.org/ or their own website: www.feedbackmadagascar.org
A couple of weeks ago we ran a competition for ten lucky schools to win a blender* from us as part of our taste not waste campaign, and we're delighted to announce that the following schools will be receiving their prizes in the new year: Trotts Hill Primary and Nursery School, Stevenage, Littledean C of E School, Gloucestershire, All Saints School, Putney Common, Rudyard Kipling Primary School, Brighton, Belvedere Infant School, Kent, The Acorns Centre Short Stay School, Lancashire, Courtlands School Widey Lane, Plymouth, Emmbrook Junior School, Wokingham, Dorothy Goodman School, Leicestershire and New York Primary School, North Shields.
Thanks to everyone who entered. It really wasn't easy picking the winners at all.
*No bike power necessary.
Mariah, Elton and Cliff are firm fixtures on the office playlist, the chocolate tin is steadily filling with empty wrappers and we're eating a lot more cheese. Christmas is most definitely on its way.
'Tis the season to be jolly, but we've got a few tips from our friends at Wrap and the WWF to help you get through the festivities as responsibly as possible.
1. Make friends with your freezer
A defrosted freezer is a happy freezer. It's also a more efficient freezer. And a man (or woman) who doesn't have to pick his way through 6 inches of ice just to get to his emergency pizza after a night on the tiles is a very happy man.
Each year in Britain we throw away around £12 billion worth of perfectly good food from our homes, most of which ends up in landfill. So over Christmas it's worth making full use of your freezer to store any food you won't get to eat in time. It's also handy for keeping bread in if you know you won't get through the whole loaf.
2. Wear your Christmas jumper with pride and turn down that heating
You'll look good, you'll feel good and you'll save money.
3. Embrace the Brussels sprout
Buy local, buy less and enjoy more seasonal fruit and vegetables such as spuds, parsnips and Brussels sprouts. Visit Eat Seasonably for information about what fruit and veg is in season now and visit Wrap for tips on how to reduce food waste.
4. Don't buy unwanted gifts
5. Make some stuff from other stuff
How to make a Christmas Tree from paper from RecycleNow, who have some other very nifty videos too.
Merry Christmas one and all.
Marisa became so fond of our little hats during the Big Knit that she decided she wanted to see even more of them. Not content with just popping them on top of the cat ornaments on her mantlepiece or her hard boiled eggs, she made them into a very special advent calendar by embroidering numbers on each one. Apparently her friends are already putting their orders in for next year.
It sure beats the usual cardboard chocolate offerings and is a lovely way to make use of the hats when the drinks they once sat upon are nothing but a distant memory.
Taste not waste (our little project to do good with unwanted fruit) is coming to the end of its trial run at East Sheen Primary School, so we thought it was worth a look down memory lane at how it's all gone. In the 10 or so weeks it's been running we've seen:
1 founder on a Blendavenda
1 MP Zac Goldsmith on a Blendavenda
Quite a lot of cheering (or jeering?)
300 children on the Blendavenda (those that could reach the pedals, and not all at once)
450 happy smoothie-filled kids
1 visit to the Houses of Parliament
And over 1500 portions of fruit saved
To celebrate reaching our target of 1500 portions of fruit and being well on our way to 2000, we've got ten blenders to give away to ten lucky schools. We'd love it if we could kick start a mini waste revolution, so we've put together this handy guide to help others do good with unwanted fruit. To be in with a chance of winning one of our blenders for your school click here, and please get your entries in by Friday 16th December.
Tackling food waste is really important to us as a business, so we're really happy to be one of the first business to sign up to the Feeding the 5000 Food Waste Pyramid.
The pledge has been developed in partnership with Love Food Hate Waste and is supported by the Mayor of London, and it offers businesses a really simple set of priorities to follow to help them save resources and divert waste from landfill.
We have waste reduction targets in place already and donate any excess drinks to the charity Fareshare or to be used as animal feed, but we're always looking at ways we can improve and we know that this will be a great help to us and to others who are looking to do things a bit more responsibly.
This Friday Tristram Stuart, the lovely ladies from A Taste Of Freedom and a few helpers are making lunch for 5000 people, and you're all invited.
Highlighting the ridiculousness of food waste, they'll be cooking up a storm with fresh ingredients that would have otherwise been thrown away. So expect wonky carrots, misshapen potatoes and other surplus yet still delicious veg aplenty.
If the photos from last year are anything to go by, it's well worth a visit to watch all of this
be abracadabra-ed onto plates like this
and into waiting mouths like this
You'll have to be quick though, it's first come first fed.
We've also got a little project on the go to try and do good with unwanted fruit. It's called taste not waste and you can read all about it and watch a video of Rich on a bike powering a blender here.
Over the past few weeks we've been turning perfectly good fruit that would have otherwise gone to waste into smoothies at a local school, and we've been helped along the way by FareShare who've been delivering the fruit to East Sheen Primary School each and every week.
FareShare are a national UK charity supporting communities to relieve food poverty, and our Lou popped down to their depot at Park Royal the other week to see just what goes on in an average day.
Here she met Daniel, the depot boss (the chap on the left), and David, a nice man who works there.
As well as promoting the message that ‘No Good Food Should Be Wasted’ and providing training and education in safe food preparation and nutrition through their Eat Well Live Well programme, FareShare get good quality surplus product from the food and drink industry to people who really need it. In 2010/11, the food redistributed by FareShare contributed towards more than 8.6 million meals. That's a lot of food.
Here's where the goods arrive
Pineapples and oranges like these are perfect for turning into smoothies
Pointing at things in crates is par for the course when you work in a warehouse
David checks off the day's orders to make sure everything's going to the right place.
To find out a bit more about what we're up to and watch a video of our Rich on a bike-powered blender head here http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/tastenotwaste/ (if you're a bit short of time, skip straight to 1:20 to see the man himself in action).
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