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Cook and Nourish
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Cook and Nourish
Reduce Waste: Shop, Storage & Serving Tips
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We’re back with Sam Hubble from Love Food Hate Waste for more simple, high-impact ways to reduce food waste at home without guilt. If you want to save money on your food shop, feel calmer midweek, and stop throwing away ingredients you meant to use, this is for you.
We start with freezer tips that actually change behaviour: how to freeze food so it doesn’t clump into one unusable block, why labelling is a kindness to future you, and a genuinely brilliant trick for leftover herbs using an ice cube tray. We also point you towards practical Love Food Hate Waste resources for storage, freezing guidance, and recipe ideas that help you use what you’ve already got.
Then we move into prevention: meal planning, shopping lists that fit your life, and the quick “take a photo of the fridge and cupboards” habit that stops accidental duplicates. We also tackle one of the biggest drivers of UK household food waste, cooking and serving too much, with portion planning tools, family-style serving, and the idea of a weekly “use up day” so leftovers become a plan rather than a problem. Finally, we clear up food waste recycling basics, including what to do with cooking oil, and why keeping a simple food waste diary can reveal the patterns that cost you the most.
If this helped, subscribe, share it with a fellow home cook, and leave a review so more people can find practical ways to waste less and eat well.
Back With More Waste-Saving Tips
SPEAKER_00Hello, lovely cooks, and welcome back to Cook and Nourish and the second part of the brilliant tips from Sam Hubble at Love Food Hate Waste. I'm so glad you enjoyed the first half of the interview. If you missed it, you can catch up on Sam's brilliant ideas for saving money and food in episode 12. But for now, let's dive back in for more ideas from Sam.
Freezer Skills That Prevent Clumps
SPEAKER_00A couple of weeks ago, I did an episode about freezers. I keep a lot of whole ingredients in the freezer so that I can be responsive to what's happening in life and not worry about it dying in the fridge.
SPEAKER_01I um share your love for the freezer. It allows us to press pause and you know we we all live busy lives and it just gives us more time to get through that food before it spoils.
SPEAKER_00You know, you have the amazing tool on Love Food Hate Waste website that speaks fridge and helps you figure out how to adjust your fridge. Are there any similar tools you have to help people use their freezer better?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we have a specific food and recipes page. So you can search either by recipes or by any kind of food, and then it will tell you how to store that, if it can be frozen, if it can be frozen, the best way to freeze it. For example, if you want to freeze things like berries or pieces of chicken or anything that you don't want to clump together, then it will give you guidance around freezing it at first on a baking tray and kind of separating things out until it's frozen, and then you can transfer it to a container so they won't stick together. And that enables you to get out as much as you want as a portion rather than having this frozen lump that has to be defrosted in one massive, massive go.
SPEAKER_00Those kind of tips, learning how to freeze things well, means you end up using it, it becomes helpful. Otherwise, you have just created a giant lump, which becomes more of a problem than a solution. And that's not the point, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and we've got loads of others as well. One of my personal favorites, and it's again one that's quite simple. It sounds simple, but I find it's really helpful, is just making sure you label everything or you put it in.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01Food tends to have a tendency to kind of look the same once it's in a container and then in a freezer. And you know, sometimes it might only be in there for a few days, sometimes it might be in there for a few months, and yeah, it's beyond me to remember what I froze a few months ago. So I'm doing future me a favor by uh labeling it and making sure that it's not like we have a running joke at work that it's a UFO and it's just like an unidentified frozen object.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But trying to avoid that by effective labeling.
SPEAKER_00100%. You're singing my song here, Sam, because I say so much about helping future you give future you the all the help that they can get because they will not know what the unidentified red package is. Mine's always red. What was it? Was it chili? Was it spag ball? Is this a kind of Mexican sauce I made? Label it and future you will not have to play the guessing game. It's a simple win.
SPEAKER_01One of my favorites, small, but actually, I always get a real sense of satisfaction from doing it. Any kind of herbs, if you buy a pack of herbs and you're only going to use half of them, rather than that kind of wilting away quietly in the fridge, I chop them up into an ice cube tray and then top it up with water. And then whenever in the future I'm using a recipe that needs that herb, rather than going out and buying it again and kind of repeating the waste of it, I just simply pop out an ice cube straight into the recipe.
SPEAKER_00Brilliant. I love it. I'm gonna have to come up with some freezer options for my spring onions so that I can stop wasting them. That's my new plan for this week.
Meal Planning That Actually Works
SPEAKER_00One of the other ways that I reduce my food waste is with meal planning. Meal planning is a huge part of the way that I get through my week. Would you agree that it's one of the key ways we can reduce waste for ourselves and save money?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And only buying the amount of food that you need is arguably one of the most important things you can do when it comes to preventing food waste. If you start off with the right amount of food, it's quite easy to then use it all up before it spoils. But if you start off with too much, you're still facing an uphill battle because you simply had too much food to begin with. So making meal plans and shopping lists to just have the right amount of food to begin with makes it much easier and less daunting and less overwhelming. Um, for this reason, I used to always buy large bags of carrots and I just won't do it now because I never ever get through them.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I always buy them individually and buy them loose. Sometimes it can be counterintuitive because the sort of unit value if you buy a large bag of carrots is often better than buying one or two carrots, but it's only better value if you use them.
SPEAKER_00100%.
SPEAKER_01So and I try and take that ethos into particularly with fresh produce that tends to have a shorter life.
SPEAKER_00Am I saving some money buying the carrots and then throwing it out later? It's it's an easy equation to do in your head. I only need to buy what I'm going to use. Do you have anything on the website that helps with shopping lists or anything like that?
SPEAKER_01There is um a tool that helps you make a shopping list and it reflects the fact that people operate in different ways. And it talks about the different ways you can build a shopping list and kind of how to build that over a number of days, whether you have one stuck on the fridge or you keep one on the kitchen side, or whether you use one on your phone or use digital assistance or even artificial intelligence chatbots, people seem to be using much more these days. So my plea would be to just find one that works for you. There's no right or wrong way to doing it, but if you do it, that's a really good start. And don't forget, as part of building a shopping list, check what you've got before you go shopping to avoid buying things that you've already got at home.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01If you just don't have time to make a list before you go, take a picture of your fridge and your pantry or your cupboards, and then you've got a prompt when you're shopping.
SPEAKER_00That's a genius idea. Flying out the door, grab the bags, quick photo of the cupboard, quick photo of the fridge, and then get to your supermarket and go, do I have any check? Oh, I do. I don't need to buy that extra thing. That's a brilliant tip. I love it. Any other tips that the cook can use to reduce waste and save money?
Portion Planning Without Guesswork
SPEAKER_01One thing we've not talked about yet is portioning. And one of the key causes of food waste in UK homes is that people cook or serve too much food. So affecting your portion planning can be a really great way to reduce poor wasting.
SPEAKER_00What a brilliant tip. You've cooked it, but don't serve it all up. It's how much you're serving up matters enormously. How have you got any help on how we can portion up better?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the Love Food Hate Waste website has a portion planning calculator. And you can tailor that to Yeah, it's a really, really useful tool. You can tailor it to different appetites.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_01I've got young kids, so I can put a meal in to the calculator and say I want it for two adults and two children, or you can tailor it to whatever kind of party size, and then it will tell you a recommendation on how much food you'll need. So you can use that then to help you plan what you need to buy, but then also what you're going to cook and then how you're going to serve it as well. So uh no, I would definitely recommend visiting that tool and using it. It's it's a really useful, simple, practical tool.
SPEAKER_00What about um when we're serving up our food? You know, any other tips for when it comes to dishing up dinner?
SPEAKER_01A really neat tip, and it's one that's often overlooked when we talk about portioning, because people think about portioning as how much to cook in the first place. But how you serve it can be really important. If you serve food kind of buffet style or family style, so it's in a kind of central dish or whatever, and allowing people to serve themselves, they know how hungry they are and how much they want to eat. But it also means if if you want to give out for seconds, then you can do. But it just avoids us ending up with mountains of food on plates that aren't going to be eaten. Once it's ended up on a plate, it's either going to end up in someone's stomach or it's going to end up in a food waste caddy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So instead, leave it in this middle and then it's it's not contaminated. So if it doesn't get eaten, it's still able to be kept for leftovers and using another day.
SPEAKER_00Whereas if it's in a dish on the table, it ends up avoiding becoming a mixed food from multiple category unidentified objects in our food waste.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00Going back to the buffet service, I it just made me smile so much because my son is now 10. But if you've served up a more food than they can eat, and then they've touched absolutely everything and manipulated it, it's not going to be that appetizing for anybody else. So I love the idea of that sort of buffet style, family style serving. It's such an easy win. I love it.
SPEAKER_01So this serving family or buffet style is really useful as we lead into barbecue season and when we're having parties with often larger numbers of guests. Yeah. Um, so it means that you can keep any leftovers in the fridge and use the next day. Building in a sense of using food up can be a really useful tool. And indeed, like as part of the planning process and planning meals and shopping. Sometimes I build in a use up day each week. So I'm kind of proactively building in a plan that I will have odds and ends. And rather than not knowing what to do with it, I'll just be like, oh, Wednesday's looking like it's a free night. That's the night I'm going to use all these odds and ends up. Whether it's kind of making a curry or building something into a nice salad or a wrap. There's loads of recipes that you can flex to build in those ingredients.
SPEAKER_00I couldn't agree more, Sam. I actively build in a leftovers day because I know inevitably there's going to be bits that mountain up through the week.
Food Caddies Oils And Fatbergs
SPEAKER_00You've given us so many brilliant ways to save ingredients, but what about the stuff like scraps and bones and oil, the things that we definitely can't use? I think with the increasing number of bins we've got and services, it can get a little bit confusing. Any tips on making that easier for us?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so nearly all of us in the UK now have access to food waste recycling service uh provided by our council. And this makes it super easy to recycle our food waste. So most people will have one kitchen caddy and then they'll have an outside caddy as well, an outside bin. And you can line the caddy with compostable liners, paper bags, newspaper. And the kind of golden rule is any food can go in the caddy, but no liquids. So it's really straightforward, it's a nice simple rule. And if you've got a small amount of cooking oil, you can put it in your food caddy, but larger amounts can't go in. Um, but it should also not go down the sink. We've all seen fairly grim footage of uh fat burgs and things down sewers, and and that is a key cause of it. So yeah, um, it shouldn't go in the caddy. What should people do? Mop it up ideally and then put it in your general waste. If if it's a small amount, it can go in the caddy. But yeah, for larger amounts, that is what we would recommend.
SPEAKER_00Fantastic. Yeah, it needs to go in the bin. It does not want to go in down the sink and it does not want to go huge amounts into the caddy.
SPEAKER_01So there's lots of benefits from recycling our food waste. I don't have time to go through all of them now, but I mean one of the main ones is that it keeps food out of landfill and it can help to produce uh really useful byproducts, including renewable energy and also something that's called digestate, but it's basically a really nutrient-rich fertilizer that can kind of join the circular economy and go back into helping create more food in fields. So it's yeah, it's a really useful way of making something useful out of something that might otherwise just be rotting away in a landfill.
SPEAKER_00That's brilliant. And like you say, completing that circle. I'm not sure people realise how much fertilizer we import into this country. So anything we can do to keep the chain and the circle going domestically here is a brilliant idea. I've loved that piece of information.
SPEAKER_01We want to waste as little food as we can, but we also want to make sure that the inevitable bits that sometimes don't get eaten or the inedible bits, the next best thing that can happen to it is for it to be recycled.
SPEAKER_00All of these tips, it all comes back to me for the wonderful idea of keeping a food waste diary. There's so much here that we could start to see what goes in our caddy, where are we losing the food in our own little chain, in our in the way we cook? Being able to go back and take that simple tip, I think it's one of the best things I've heard about reducing our own food waste is keeping that diary.
SPEAKER_01I keep a watching brief on my food caddy, and I would encourage people to do it. Like have a look at what you're putting in. Is it just the inedible bits like the eggshells, the bones, the tea bags, or are there certain foods that you're noticing are regularly going uneaten that could have been eaten? And then if so, if you're noticing anything, then think about how you're buying it, how you're storing it, how you're cooking it, how you're serving it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And then try and make changes and play around with it and see if they help you to reduce what you're throwing away.
SPEAKER_00Sam, I cannot thank you enough for the wealth of information that you've given us today. I think it's a really enormous subject that can be daunting for people. But these small changes we can make with our own homes can amount to enormous immediate changes for ourselves. We will see those differences straight away. So thank you so much. Will you come talk to us again?
SPEAKER_01Definitely. Love to.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. Thank you so much, Sam. We'll talk to you again.
Food Waste Diary And Goodbye
SPEAKER_00Thank you for spending this time with me and Sam at Cook and Nourish today. I hope you can put Sam's brilliant tips to work in your kitchen to reduce waste and save your money. Remember to click subscribe and come back again for more cook friendly tips. So until next time, happy cooking.