Do Not Throw Away these Ingredients!

1- Pasta Water

Watering your plants and flowers

Water which has been used to cook pasta is full of starch, which is often rich in minerals and vitamins, making it helpful for growing plants and flowers. So the next time you boil your pasta, use it to water the garden rather than drain it.

Making homemade pizza dough and bread

Since pasta water retains some of the flavours and starch from the pasta, it will give your homemade pizza dough, or bread, a new and unique taste. If your bread recipe requires water, save your pasta water in the fridge. Later, when you make bread, you can use the leftover pasta water instead of tap water.

Cooking rice

Pasta water can add some flavour and richness to rice. Instead of boiling rice in tap water, use your leftover pasta water in rice. If you are making a big meal, it can be easy to simply transfer your pasta water to another pot when you are done cooking. You can then bring that water to a boil and use it to cook rice.

2- Sourdough starter

Freeze it – it can stay in the freezer for up to a year if covered well enough until you are in the mood to deal with it. If you are discarding regularly, you can freeze it in small portions, depending on how you are going to use it up. (Check out my article here for instructions on how to freeze it properly)

Refrigerate it – it will be fine for at least a few months until you are ready to use it. It’s also pretty easy to keep adding any discard to it on a daily/weekly basis until you have enough of it for a particular recipe.

Now, here are a few novel ways to use it up if you don’t want to use it for a recipe:

Add it to your compost pile – sourdough starter is surprisingly good for your compost heap. All the friendly bacteria are an excellent way to add extra nutrients to your soil. Simply dump any excess starter into your compost heap and you’re good to go.

Add it to your skincare regime – Yes, you read that correctly. Lactic acid bacteria and probiotics in skincare is all the rage now. According to this study, the type of bacteria found in sourdough starter is good for skin. Try adding it to a mixture of natural yogurt and honey, to be used as a facial, or body mask. It will give your skin a good dose of good bacteria to help balance it out. 

3- Orange peel

1 – Recycle orange peels in the kitchen

When you peel the citrus try as better as you can to separate the whites from the colored parts.

You can use the thicker peels to do the typical Christmas Sweets: candied orange peels covered with chocolate.

Otherwise, put the peels on a plate and leave them to dry for a few days (could be close to the woodstove or a heater).

Then you can store them in a glass jar,  to use it for example to make a custard or other preparations in which you need the whole pieces of peel.

2- Making candles with the peels of tangerines or oranges

If you want to share with friends or with children a scientific and creative activity at the same time you can cut the peel of the tangerine along the circumference, and then remove the top half part without breaking it. We will have a half peel empty and half full of whole cloves.

At the centre of the cloves, there is a beam of white strands: the “wick”, in fact. We remove the cloves without breaking the white filaments in the centre. In the other half without wick, we cut a decorative hole, for example like a star shape. Fill the half with the filaments with olive oil, so that the wick protrudes from the oil level about 5mm (0,20 inch).

Set fire to the wick with a match or a lighter. When this is light, place the second half of tangerine peel on our candle.