You know those old, soft and slightly bruised fruit and veggies at the back of your fridge? Don’t throw them out! Instead, devour Alex Elliott-Howery and Jaimee Edwards’ latest cookbook, The Food Saver’s A–Z. In it you’ll find waste hacks, storage tips, swaps and shortcuts for more than 150 common veggies, fruits and kitchen staples. The timeless resource is packed full of ideas and advice for reducing food waste and instilling confidence in your cooking, and will help you use up anything you’re sick of looking at in the fridge or pantry. Plus you’ll impress family and friends with loads of delicious and healthy recipes from the popular Sydney-based Cornersmith Cooking School. Let The Food Saver’s A–Z be your new best friend in the kitchen. The planet will love you for it. As the authors say in their introduction, “You don’t need to be perfectly sustainable — even small changes will make a difference.”

Green Things Fritters

Long live the fritter. Could there be a more forgiving and useful trick up your sleeve? When in doubt, make fritters. When the fridge needs a clear-out, make fritters. When the veggie patch is looking like it could do with a tidy-up, make fritters. Here’s a green fritter recipe for all of the above. Use spinach, silver beet, zucchini, kale, celery leaves, peas, herbs or a mix of what you have.

Makes: 5-6

Fritters

• 1 bunch (about 350g) spinach, finely chopped
• 1 cup fresh herbs of choice
• ½ cup grated or crumbled cheese (haloumi and strained feta cheese work well)
• ¼ cup plain (all-purpose) flour
• 3 eggs beaten with ½ tsp salt 2 tbsp oil

Directions 

1. Mix fritter ingredients in a bowl.
2. Heat oil in a frying pan over medium–high heat and pour in ½ cupful of the green mix, cooking 2–3 fritters at a time for 3 mins on each side.
3. Serve the fritters warm, but they’re also great the next day for a packed lunch.

Odd-Knobs Ginger Paste

This little recipe is indispensable for using up kitchen scraps. It packs a punch and can be used as the base for a curry or laksa, stirred into yoghurt for a quick marinade or added to a noodle dish or fried rice.

Makes: 1 cup

• Ginger
• Garlic
• Onion
• Chilli
• Carrot
• Celery
• Herb stems 2 tsp salt

Directions

1. Gather up all those old knobs of ginger, wash (don’t bother peeling unless they’re really old) and throw into a food processor with a bit of garlic, onion, chilli, carrot, celery and herb stems. You want about 200g of ingredients all up, so make up this amount with whatever you have.
2. Give it a good blitz then add 2 tsp salt and blitz again to make a paste.
3. Transfer to a clean and dry container and keep refrigerated for up to 1 month. You could add a layer of neutral oil on the surface to help the ginger paste last even longer, about 2 months in the fridge.
4. Next time you sauté onions, add 1–2 tbsp ginger paste and let your taste buds sing.

Pasta Frittata

Now before you skip over this recipe because it sounds a bit ordinary, give this pasta frittata a chance. It’s garlicky and parmesany and no one complains when you serve it. It’s good for simple minimal-ingredient dinners, cuts well for lunchboxes and reheats for breakfast. And it uses up the strange amounts of cooked pasta in the fridge — penne, shells, even spaghetti. Here we mean cooked pasta with no sauce; a little oil and salt and pepper is OK, but please don’t make this with leftover spaghetti bolognese.

Serves: 4-6

• 80mL extra-virgin olive oil
• 4 sliced garlic cloves
• 1–3 cups (about 175– 525g) cooked pasta
• ¼ tsp salt & pepper
• 10 eggs ½ tsp salt & pepper
• ⅓ cup finely grated parmesan

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 180°C.
2. In an ovenproof non-stick frying pan, heat olive oil over medium–low heat. Add garlic cloves and cook gently until fragrant but not burnt.
3. Add cooked pasta and sauté the pasta with the garlic for 1–2 mins. Add salt and pepper and mix well. Reduce the heat to low and cook, covered, for 10 mins, shaking the pan often to avoid burning.
4. In a medium bowl, whisk 10 eggs with salt and pepper and parmesan.
5. Remove the lid and spread out the pasta to cover the base of the frying pan evenly. Turn up the heat to medium and pour in your eggy mix. When the edges frill up a little, reduce the heat again and cook for 10 mins, until the egg mixture is almost set — it will still be liquid on top.
6. Top the frittata with extra cheese and then transfer to the oven and let the top cook through. Once it’s ready, carefully slide the omelette upside down onto a plate. Serve with a green salad and an onion relish.

Images and text from The Food Saver’s A–Z by Alex Elliott-Howery and Jaimee Edwards. Published by Murdoch Books, RRP $49.99