"StaleBread" news and stories

With a bit of advance planning, there's really no reason to ever buy breadcrumbs at the grocery store.

I've always been pretty good with leftovers. I always make soup out of roast chicken remains and I have a passing understanding of how to transform bits of one meal into something fresh and interesting for the next. However, at the end of each week, I still find myself throwing out more uneaten food than I'd like. In general, I dislike the waste but more poignantly, I regret depriving the ingredients of their potential (especially when I toss animal products).

However, this week, inspired by this post about food waste at the Non-Consumer Advocate, I managed to avoid waste where I might have otherwise tossed. I made a big pot of chicken soup, using up an aging hunk of red cabbage (once cooked, it was impossible to tell that it was a bit wilted), several bits of half-used onion and most happily, a painfully stale six-inch chunk of seeded baguette. I broke the bread into bits, placed some of it into the bottom of the bowls and ladled the soup on top. The once-stale bread became silky and tender, adding a lovely texture and taste to the meal.

How do you avoid food waste in your kitchen?

I've made breadcrumbs a handful of times in the past, but never on a regular basis. However, I've had many missed breadcrumb opportunities as I've thrown away more crusts of bread than I'd like to admit. In an attempt to stop tossing perfectly good food, I've been trying to reinvent ingredients and last night, I made meatballs as a way to avoid waste.

The meatballs became dinner because I had a pound of local, grass-fed ground beef in the freezer and a big hunk of two week old bread (really good bread from Philly's Metropolitan Bakery) that needed to be used up. I also managed to salvage some aging green onions and the last two inches of a log of goat cheese in the process.

I always forget how easy it is to make breadcrumbs and how homemade ones enhance any food you pair them with. They gave the meatballs an appealing lightness while also allowing the exteriors to get nicely crunchy, creating a fantastic textural pairing. They're also wonderfully simple to make. My instructions are after the jump and the step-by-step pictures are in the gallery below.

Do you have problems getting a through a tasty loaf of fresh bread before it's stale?