Prue Leith and Dr Rupy Aujla come to the rescue in inspiring new cookery show to tackle food waste

Here in the UK, the equivalent of one in six bags of food shopping we buy or one in eight meals we make goes straight in the bin, and every year we throw away food worth almost £14 billion. But help is at hand.

Bake Off judge Prue Leith and Dr Rupy Aujla, host of hit YouTube show and bestselling book series The Doctor’s Kitchen, aim to transform our cooking and shopping habits and save us money in new Channel 4 series Cook Clever, Waste Less With Prue & Rupy.

Dr Rupy, 36, is a GP who started The Doctor’s Kitchen in 2015 as a way of teaching us how to cook our way to better health. As well as judging Bake Off, Prue, 81, is also known as the Leftover Queen because she hates throwing anything away. 

Bake Off judge Prue Leith and Dr Rupy Aujla, host of hit YouTube show and bestselling book series The Doctor’s Kitchen, aim to transform our cooking and shopping habits and save us money in new Channel 4 series Cook Clever, Waste Less With Prue & Rupy 

‘They do call me that,’ she laughs. ‘People often say to my husband, “You must be so lucky” and he says, “Well, I live on leftovers”, because he’s a bit rude. He does sometimes follow it up by saying he’s hardly ever had the same thing twice and it’s always delicious, but by then it’s too late! I always remind him the leftovers started as primary ingredients though.’

In the show Prue and Rupy head round the country trying to help families tackle their food waste and reduce their shopping bills. They devise meal plans and rustle up healthy new recipes using up food that would have been thrown away normally. 

‘It really is possible to waste less, save money, eat better and improve your health,’ says Dr Rupy. 

Here they show you how you can do it too…

USE YOUR LOAF 

According to Prue, she was ‘horrified’ to learn how much food we waste saying, the top of the list for food waste is bread 

‘I was horrified to learn on this programme just how much food we waste,’ says Prue. 

‘For example, top of the list is bread. We throw more bread away than anything else. 

‘I think I might write a stale-bread cookbook because there are so many things you can do with it, like make and freeze breadcrumbs.’

A delicious spring panzanella salad using leftover bread (pictured)

In Yorkshire Prue and Rupy visit single mum Danielle Webster-Holmes, who all too often resorts to takeaways for her two girls. 

They get her batch-cooking tasty meals, and show her how to make a delicious spring panzanella salad using leftover bread.

Prue has some other ideas of her own too. 

‘The other day I made a bread pudding, rather like you would make bread and butter pudding except instead of buttering the bread and putting custard all over it, you smear pesto sauce all over the stale bread then layer it up with tomatoes and garlic and bake the whole thing in the oven with a crispy cheesy top made from egg yolks, milk, grated cheese, salt and pepper. 

‘And it’s so delicious – squishy and rich in the middle and crunchy on the top – but I have to say it’s probably not the healthiest thing you could eat!’

SAVE £1,000 A YEAR! 

Prue Leith, 81, and Dr Rupy Aujla, 36, aim to transform the nation’s cooking and shopping habits in new Channel 4 series Cook Clever, Waste Less With Prue & Rupy. Pictured: Rupy and Prue with Sanjeev and Preeti Arora-Anand

‘We’ve saved every family on the show a minimum of £1,000 a year, and some of them save multiples of that,’ says Rupy. 

‘The question I always ask is, “What are you going to do with this extra money? Just think about that as your motivating factor.” And honestly, this will encourage you to meal-plan. I mass-cook food and then freeze half of it, while the rest will last for at least three or four days.’

TOTALLY BANANAS, BUT IT WORKS! 

We throw away edible fruit and vegetables worth a horrifying £2.5 billion in the UK each year, including nearly a million bananas every day. 

But Prue and Rupy show how we can transform these wasteful habits. In Bristol they visit David and Nadya Parshall, who are trying to cater for their sons who have food allergies. 

Prue and Rupy design a food plan that’s gluten and dairy-free, with recipes including a rich parsnip cake (above) and a delicious smoothie that uses up banana skins.

‘I’d never seen anybody use banana peel in anything until Rupy chopped up the skin and put it in the blender with coconut milk, peanut butter, a pinch of salt and a touch of cinnamon, and it was amazing,’ says Prue. 

‘I came home and made one for my husband. When I asked him what he thought it was, he said, “Delicious, it’s a banana milkshake.” So I said, “No, it’s a banana skin milkshake!”’ 

In Bristol, Prue and Rupy design a food plan that’s gluten and dairy-free for a family with food allergies, with recipes including a rich parsnip cake (pictured)

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Prue and Rupy head to Manchester where they meet busy NHS doctors Preeti and Sanjeev Arora-Anand who are struggling to juggle their hectic work lives and the multiple meal demands of their three children. 

To keep everyone happy, they end up cooking three different meals a night. Prue and Rupy create a cunning plan full of delicious dishes to tickle everyone’s taste buds, including a super-simple chicken and cauliflower traybake. 

‘If you’re not a confident cook or a food-waste warrior, choose one meal at a time and make it simple,’ says Rupy. ‘Like a one-pan meal you can knock together with a few staples, and practise that every week.

‘To go one step further, make sure the meal has a leftover element. So if you’re making a roast dinner, for example, you can turn the extra roast vegetables into a salad the next day by just throwing some leaves in it, maybe adding some toasted sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds, and then all of a sudden you’ve created another meal.’

PLAN, PLAN, PLAN! 

Prue believes that the key to reducing food waste – and shopping bills – is to make a list and stick to it. 

‘One of the most boring tips is to talk about good household management because nobody wants to do this, and I don’t like doing it myself. But if you don’t, what happens is you go to the supermarket and you’re beguiled by all these things you haven’t thought of, like mangos. You save an enormous amount of time and money if you plan.

‘If you buy a whole chicken and there are two of you, you need to know what you’re going to do with the rest of it. Last week I had a beautiful free-range organic chicken. 

‘They’re quite expensive and I don’t like to throw anything away so I cut the whole bird in half and roasted one side, which we had in the traditional manner with sausage meat stuffing.

‘Then I poached the other half very gently, and we had poached chicken with tarragon and cream sauce. I made a soup from the rest of the poached chicken, plus I made stock. So you get three good meals out of one not very big chicken.’ 

GET YOURSELF IN A PICKLE! 

Making the show, Rupy was astonished at how much packaged meat was wasted. ‘We have to be more mindful about wasting meat due to ethical considerations,’ he says. ‘If you do choose to eat meat, you should really stretch it out.’

In London he and Prue meet the Thompson family, who had a bad habit of cooking a nightly back-up meal for their fussy children. 

‘So I made them a lovely Thai salad, which you can create out of leftover sandwich ham,’ says Rupy. 

‘I also make kimchi, sauerkraut and other pickles because they last for ages. You just need an airtight jar. 

‘Try chopping onion, adding vinegar, salt and hot water, and shaking it. That way you don’t waste a bag of onions. And pickled or fermented foods are probiotic, they modulate your gut microbes, improve sugar regulation and are great for digestion.’ 

Cook Clever, Waste Less With Prue & Rupy, Monday, 8.30pm, Channel 4.

Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk

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