As a food blogger, it is my job (albeit my evening and weekend, unpaid job) to search high and low for exciting ingredients, fresh recipes, and innovative takes on the usual weekday meals. These adventures often have delicious endings, but I’ve noticed that they can be somewhat…wasteful. When a recipe calls for 2 ribs of celery, what am I supposed to do with the rest of the bunch? When I peel a carrot, I end up losing half of it to the garbage! Things like this really irk me to no end; they’re so unnecessary and yet often just happen. Although it may be trendy now to repurpose, reuse, and recycle clothes, furniture, and random objects, I’ve come to realize that this philosophy can absolutely (and unfacetiously) be applied to food. As someone who tends to think about food an awful lot, this is a great way not only to alter the same old food and cooking rut, but also to reduce waste, and save some money to boot. All it takes is a small bit of pre-planning, and sometimes a wee bit of effort.
An excellent way to get more use out of your food is simply to stop throwing it away.
Repurposing leftovers to make a beautiful stock
Let me explain. Eat a lot of chicken? Freeze the carcass or bones, and make a homemade chicken stock out of them, where you can control what goes in (and what doesn’t, like unnecessary added salt or sugar). Do you peel carrots/celery/other vegetables? Save the peelings (and any leftover Parmesan rinds!) and freeze them; once you have enough stashed away in your freezer, you can add them to your stock. I’ll usually wait until I’ve got enough bones to fill my big canning pot, and make a big big batch of stock, which I then freeze and use for several months. A little while ago, there was a post floating around the Internet about how to grow your own vegetables from scraps that you have left over – for example, if the bottom of a celery root is immersed in water, a new bunch of celery can grow. My friend once squeezed the seeds from a cherry tomato in a pot of dirt and a few months later, he had 10 giant tomato plants! I’ve even heard that you can make a lovely green pesto out of the carrot top greens, a part of the vegetable that most people throw away. In a similar vein, you can also make a lovely soup out of radish greens, which was my project for this week. See below for a recipe, and get a little thrifty this week, Calgary!
Radish Greens Soup 
Ingredients (makes 4 starter size servings; scale up as needed)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 medium shallot or small onion, diced
1 potato, diced
radish greens from one bunch of radishes
1 chicken thigh/breast
1 carrot, sliced
1 celery stalk, sliced
1 bay leaf
2 tablespoons sour cream
Method
1. Heat olive oil over medium heat in a pot; add onion and potato and sweat for 7 minutes, stirring to prevent sticking.
2. Add radish greens, and cook for 2-3 minutes. Add chicken and brown on both sides.
3. Add carrots, celery, bay leaf, and about 2 cups water. Bring pot to boil, cover and turn down heat. Allow to simmer for at least 30 minutes.
4. After simmering, take pot off heat, and allow to cool. Take out chicken and shred using 2 forks.
5. Blend soup using an immersion blender or an actual blender (if using a blender, wait until the soup is cool before blending, as blending hot liquids = lots of splashing). Pro tip: put pot into the sink and blend with the immersion blender to avoid splashes.
6. Taste soup, adding salt and pepper as needed. This is a thin soup, but if it is too thin for your liking, boil it over high heat for about 10 minutes to reduce and thicken.
7. To serve, swirl through sour cream, and top with shredded chicken and some sliced radish.