Food wasting: Shocking Statistics. Left-over breakfast recipe: Pumpkin pancakes

Jams in my fridge and honey

I was going through my thoughts and notes on what to blog about this time when the alarm bells hit my ears on the evening news program: the European Commission has recently published statistics that 89 million tons of usable food is annually wasted  across EU27. That food is wasted by households (42%), by production and processing (39%), by catering establishments (14%) and by retail (5%). If we continue this way there will be 126 million tons of food wasted per year by 2020. Outrageous statistics and bad behaviour!

“Best before” or “Consume by” are two different things.
Indeed consuming fresh dairy or meat products with a passed “Consume by” date can cause health problems and I wouldn’t advise anyone to do it, however “Best before” just denotes until when the quality of that product is best and not when it becomes unusable. It is easy to mix up these two, but picturing 3,5 million trailer trucks full of wasted food that is generated in European Union the distinction between the two can make a whole lot of difference. All these trucks standing behind each other are more than enough to make a trip around the Equator. On top of the issue of wasting food that people can eat, how does the environment cope with the mountain of waste?
If foods with a past best before date have been stored in good conditions, the food is likely to be good for some time.
In many countries there are organisations that collect and distribute the food close to “Consume by” and “Best Before” dates to people and organisations in need. In Switzerland a few of my colleagues and I worked with one of such -"Schweizer Tafel"- last year. In my home country there is a similar "Estonian Food Bank".

I hereby reach out to the readers and ask to please support in the ways small or big available to you to help reduce the food waste.

Tips on how to reduce waste and turn leftovers into tasty ingredients:

- Leftovers from the fridge (eg. slightly wilted vegetables) or dry goods cupboard (eg. lentils and beans past “Best before” date) make wonderful soups, stews or pancakes
- Pasta stores long after the best before date
- Dinner leftovers make a good lunch the next day
- It is worth checking the inside of canned foods past “Best before” date before just throwing them away
- Cut the old rye bread –very popular in Estonia – into small cubes, roast in the oven and eat as a healthy snack alternative, but DON´T eat the mouldy old bread.
-Make croutons or bread crumbs from the hardened white bread
-Check the freshness of the eggs by carefully dropping an egg into a glass filled with cold water. If the egg drops to the bottom it is good to eat, if it stays on the top it is not fresh.

Check eggs for freshness: The egg at the bottom is fresh

Pumpkin Pancakes
To use up an egg or two that has been in the fridge for some time and a piece of pumpkin try these pancakes for breakfast with a mug of freshly brewed coffee.

Ingredients

2 eggs
250g pumpkin of any type
120g flour (1 cup)
0.5tl baking soda if you wish to make small thick pancakes
1.5 dl butter milk or fresh milk
a pinch of salt
1 teaspoon sugar
Rape seed oil or sunflower oil for frying

Grated pumpkin adds colour

Mix the eggs, salt and sugar with a fork, add some milk and mix again. Add the flour and baking soda, mix again. Leave a little milk for later or add some water if the dough becomes too thick. As last add the thinly grated pumpkin. Mix everything. Let rest for 10-15 minutes for the flour to expand.
Heat some oil in a shallow frying pan and fry either small pancakes or crepe-type over the pan pancakes.
Serve with honey or jam. There may be some jars of jam open in the fridge that are waiting to be eaten and not eventually thrown away.

Fluffy pumpkin/squash pancackes

Every Nation Enjoys Their Comfort Food: Dutch Mashed Potatoes with Kale (Boerenkool)

This week my work travel took me to Schagen in the Netherlands where I spent a couple of days with seed potato growers from Scotland, England, Poland and Holland as well as my equally international colleagues. We had been visiting potato grading stations and warehouses in the unfriendly weather with a brief glimpse into a windmill that tamed the heavy wind into flour for a local bakery. For the first time I visited a greenhouse where 1.000.000 tulips were being grown at a time. The farmer’s wife was not so keen on the bulbs but rather on tourism and had set up a complementing business branch providing tulip excursions. The excursion started with hot coffee and a selection of fresh cakes from the bakery that was as heart-warming to the freezing group as the first snowdrops in front of my house in the middle of January.

Dutch tulips grown in soil, not in hydroponics (Blackberry photo quality)

As we travelled in the car to the tulip greenhouse we passed a field where unusual green plants were growing. It was curly kale or boerenkool in Dutch or Federkohl in German. This type of cabbage is in season only in winter. My Dutch colleague told me that they eat boerenkool with mashed potatoes and sausage. It sounded as a delicious comfort food cooked and enjoyed by Dutch families. I promised to try it. The cooking instructions were quite general and I deliberately did not search on the web for such recipes. The nature of this true example of the northern potato-cabbage dish sounded simple and I jumped to the experiment after I was lucky to find some kale still on sale at the Saturday farmers´ market.

There was one challenge – the onions! How did Meryl Streep in the role of Julia Child manage to slice the pile of onions almost as high as the Eiffel Tower without destroying her make-up or displaying any signs of tears? My trick of not crying over the onions has been the simple ventilation above the stove. Since it is broken now I was faced with a task and a question how do I do it without ending up in a mess of rabbit eyes and running mascara.

Apparently there is always a reason for things to happen when they happen. This morning I was reading How Not To Cry on Clotilde Dusoulier´s Chocolate & Zucchini e voilà, I found a perfect opportunity to try out some tips. This time I picked the "spoon in the mouth" and was hoping not to cry. Slicing the onion trying to manoeuvre with the knife and balance the spoon in my mouth was a challenge, but I DID NOT CRY!


Shopping list:
1 kg of starchy potatoes (eg Agria)
200 g of kale (Boerenkool/Federkohl)
200 g sausage cut into bite size pieces
0.5 dl or 2 tablespoons fresh cream
1 medium large onion
Rape seed oil
Salt, pepper

Peel and cut the potatoes into bigger pieces, chop the cabbage into smaller pieces.
Pour a little rape seed oil into a cooking pot. Add the potatoes, cabbage and 0.5l water or bouillon. Add some salt or 1 cube of bouillon when using water.

Bring to boil and reduce heat. Simmer for ca 20 minutes until the vegetables are soft. Then mash the potatoes together with kale. I only mashed slightly to keep a bit chunky.
Add the sausage and cream and heat up again.

The last thing left to do is the onion. In a separate pan heat 2-3 tablespoons of rape oil and sauté the sliced onion until golden. Add a pinch of salt to the onion if you prefer.

Serve the creamy mash with the onions.

Estonian Apple Crumble Cake

Apple Crumble Cake

A weekend deserves a sweet treat. Even if the extra kilos that have accumulated around the hip-waist line like a life saving ring since Christmas and New Year’s festivities. A piece of cake fresh from the oven to keep up the good spirit eaten with moderation is allowed.

In Switzerland January is the season for storage apples and pears.

In Estonia it is the season for storage apples. Pears don’t store well in Estonia and one can’t find locally grown pears on the grocery store shelves, at least I think I have never seen any. Even locally grown apples in winter months are something that with the spreading fashion of “Grown and produced in Estonia”- food that is gaining popularity amongst foodies and home cooks are only recently becoming more widely available. The price versus Polish imported apples is often times higher, but the availability is a positive sign and overtime hopefully the price will respond to competition.

Apple Crumble Cake

For the dough:
125g soft butter
100g sugar
1 big egg (63g+)
250g plain wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 pinch of salt
For the filling:
Ca 5 big sweet apples (eg. Golden Delicious), so less added sugar is needed
For the crumble:
75g butter
5-6 tablespoons sugar
150g flour
a pinch of baking powder
0.5 -1 teaspoon cinnamon

Mix well the butter and sugar with a hand mixer, add the egg and mix again. Stir the baking powder and salt into the flour and add to the sweet butter mixture. Mix everything together until the dough has formed. Form it into a ball with your hands and keep refrigerated until you prepare the apples.

Preheat the oven to 200C.

Peel the apples, if you prefer, clean the seeds out and cut the apples into smaller cubes.

Fit the 26cm diameter baking ring form with baking paper and spread the dough evenly on the bottom. Precook the bottom for 15 minutes.

In the meanwhile, for the crumble melt the butter. Mix the flour with sugar, baking powder and cinnamon and pour the melted butter on the flour mix. Form crumbles with a knife or your hands quickly.

Spread the apples and then the crumble on the cake and bake in the middle of the oven for 35-45 minutes until the crumble starts to brown slightly on top.

Apple Crumble Cake (Estonian: Õuna-purukook, German: Apfel-Streuselkuchen)

A number of crumble recipes call for cold butter for the crumble but whenever I use cold butter the butter in my crumble just melts and the result is not very attractive or crispy. Therefore I use melted butter. If anyone has tips of how the crumble recipe with cold butter stays crumbly and bakes into a crispy topping, please share.

Juicy Roast Ribs

BBQ ribs in summer? Yes! From the oven in winter? Bring them on!

The ribs in Swiss shops seem to be from greedy butchers. The bones bear little meat on them. One could think the poor animals have been kept on a strict diet or the butcher is trying to get away with as little as possible for the lower price. Take a few more grams off and the next alternatives would be to sell the bare bones as dog food or as stock material at best.

In Switzerland one can find very lean meat, a lot of filet  in most shops on one end and lard on the other in specialty butcher shops. You won’t find pork with rind anywhere, the cut of meat that in many countries (eg. Estonia, Australia, Germany) is served as a popular Christmas or special festive meal, pork roast with crispy crackling …

Smoke Roasted Rib Cut of Pork

Some less expensive variety meats and inner organs have found the way onto the shelves more and more in the past few years helping to live the motto of "If you already make the kill, eat everything". There is a variety of livers, kidneys and tongue to choose from as well as recently spotted fresh chicken hearts for the lovers of the Brazilian rodizio. I am still on the look for lamb tongue that I see many food bloggers blog about and would love to try.

Chicken hearts

Where I live the choice of ribs on sale is down to one: pork short ribs. So the choice is between to buy or not to buy. I buy, occasionally, despite the secretly luring subtle taste of disillusionment after the dinner. The relative equation between the bones and the meat is drawing the scale of the bones to the ground and the meat to the sky. And yes, the meat is heavenly.

Oven Roast Ribs

Ingredients:

1-2 raw 5-rib pieces per person

Salt

Black pepper

Oil

Honey

Ca. 1 table spoon of fresh lime juice per 5-rib piece

Roast ribs from the oven

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius (350-360 Fahrenheit).

Rinse the ribs in cold water and pat dry. Season with salt and pepper on both sides. Take a piece of aluminium foil big enough to wrap the ribs in and drop some oil on the inside. Place the ribs on the foil, spread some honey and drizzle some lime juice on the ribs. Wrap the foil together. Place the packages into a cooking tray and cook the ribs until the meat is falling off the bones. Check after 45 minutes that the ribs don’t burn on the bottom. The cooking time will vary depending on the thickness of the ribs and meat.

For the last 15 minutes open the foil and leave the ribs to build more browning on the top.

Serve hot.