Scraps, Peels, and Stems

Recipes and Tips for Rethinking Food Waste at Home

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224 pages
Publisher: Skipstone
ISBN: 978-1-68051-148-2
Published: Sep 10, 2018

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"Local food writer Jill Lightner knows all the tips … her brand-new book “Scraps, Peels, and Stems: Recipes and Tips for Rethinking Food Waste at Home” is stuffed full of them. If you’ve got the will to reduce how much you waste, she’s got all the ways." —Seattle Times

"[Scraps, Peels, and Stems] is loaded with tips on gardening, composting, shopping and storing. There's advice on meal planning, recipes, what to do with leftovers, both from restaurants and home cooked. All to help us minimize the amount of food we waste – an average of 18 pounds per month." —KNKX Food For Thought

2018 Gold Nautilus Book Award Winner in Green Living & Sustainability

All across the country, food processors, grocers, restaurants, and regular folks throw away perfectly edible food. In fact, every month nearly twenty pounds of food per person is thrown out in the United States, and we consumers are the worst offenders. However, the good news is that it’s easy to reduce waste—while saving money and eating healthier too!

Scraps, Peels, and Stems is a comprehensive and accessible guide to how you can reduce food waste in your daily life. Food journalist Jill Lightner shows how to manage your kitchen for less waste through practical strategies, tips, and advice on food purchasing, prep, composting, and storage. From beef bones, Parmesan rinds, and broccoli stems to bruised apples and party leftovers, Jill explains what to do with unused food, and how to avoid the extras in the first place. With attitude, a sense of humor, and the acceptance that none of us are perfect, Jill helps all of us understand some of the larger social, economic, environmental, and agricultural issues around food and its exorbitant waste. Topics and features include:

70+ recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and drinks as well as items for your pantry
Money-saving tips throughout
Three levels of action for every topic, to help you figure out what’s doable
Composting and recycling tips
Portioning to avoid leftovers on the plate
Meal planning vs. freestyle cooking
Grocery shopping and dining-out tactics
Storage strategies for small, urban kitchens—and how to read expiration dates
Insight into “nose to tail” and “root to stem” cooking trends

Through clear advice, quick tips, useful techniques, and easy recipes, Scraps, Peels, and Stems shows how, by looking at the food waste we encounter in our daily lives, we can save money and make a difference.

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Details

224 pages
Publisher: Skipstone
ISBN: 978-1-68051-148-2
Published: Sep 10, 2018

Reviews

A home kitchen isn’t too small to matter, and Jill Lightner tackles the problem head-on. She wrote an entire book about appreciating unlovable foods. Scraps, Peels, and Stems: Recipes and Tips for Rethinking Food Waste at Home is full of tips on shopping and cooking smarter.
— WFAEats
If you’re hoping to prioritize the reduction of food waste in your own life, this book offers a comprehensive guide on how to make it happen. Lightner also includes composting and recycling tips that are easy to implement.
— Brittany Loggins, Chowhound
Scraps, Peels and Stems includes plenty of tasty, budget-friendly recipes. But the “Aha!” moments are the author’s insights, strategies, tips and techniques to help you manage food waste in daily life, at home and out in the world.
— Jo Mancuso, Oregon Public Broadcasting
In Scraps, Peels, and Stems ($23), food journalist Jill Lightner offers 70+ recipes, and plenty of easy-to-implement insights into how to properly store produce, make "nose to tail" use of animal products, disregard expiration dates, and get extra mileage out of corn cobs and shrimp shells. It all makes for one lifestyle-changing, appetite-inducing read.
— Katie O'Reilly, Sierra
Combines recipes with practical advice on how to organize your kitchen to minimize waste through everything from shopping smarter, food storage and even composting and replanting scraps in the garden.
— The Imperfect Digest (Imperfect Produce)
This cookbook was made for that friend who’s actually committed to New Year’s resolutions. Do they want to reduce food waste? Save money? Eat healthier? Scraps, Peels, and Stems checks all those boxes with more than 70 recipes, plus tips on saving money, meal planning, and composting.
— Jaime Archer, Seattle Met
Scraps, Peels, and Stems clearly shows how, by utilizing the food waste we create and/or encounter in our daily lives, we can stretch our food budgets, serve nutritious meals with what used to be thoughtlessly discarded, and make a significant difference for ourselves and our planet.
— Midwest Book Review
[Scraps, Peels, and Stems] is loaded with tips on gardening, composting, shopping and storing. There's advice on meal planning, recipes, what to do with leftovers, both from restaurants and home cooked. All to help us minimize the amount of food we waste – an average of 18 pounds per month.
— Dick Stein, KNKX Food for Thought
Scraps, Peels and Stems: Recipes and Tips for Rethinking Food Waste at Home tackles a difficult topic in a positive, accessible way. Author Jill Lightner combines her culinary writing expertise with her understanding of economics to produce a thoughtful and useful book. It takes into account the challenges of daily life that can complicate our best efforts to recycle and reduce waste.
— Amy Rogers, WFAEats
Local food writer Jill Lightner knows all the tips … her brand-new book Scraps, Peels, and Stems: Recipes and Tips for Rethinking Food Waste at Home is stuffed full of them. If you’ve got the will to reduce how much you waste, she’s got all the ways.
— Bethany Jean Clement, The Seattle Times
I thought I knew enough about reducing food waste, but Scraps, Peels, and Stems showed me how much more I could do—and inspired me to actually do it. Jill Lightner has written an invaluable resource: realistic and empowering, with tips on everything from re-crisping stale cereal (!) to growing vegetables from food scraps, plus recipes for Feta-Brined Lamb Kebabs, Shrimp Shell Stock, and more. This is a vitally important book for every kitchen.
— Molly Wizenberg, author of A Homemade Life and Delancey
"It is no secret we have an enormous food waste problem in this country. What has been a bit of a secret is how best to personally go about solving the issue in a practical, effective way on a daily basis. What Jill Lightner has given us with Scraps, Peels, Stems is a brilliant, modern day, “waste not, want not” manifesto, which combines straightforward recipes and thoughtful tips that make us think before we toss. This book is something no cook or eater should be without. It’s genius. It’s inspirational. And it should become the tool for defining how well we can feed ourselves, not our landfills."
— Tracey Ryder, co-founder of Edible Communities
"Food waste happens everywhere in our lives, and to change this, we'll need to build a culture built around reducing waste. Jill Lightner's wonderfully thorough and thoughtful book makes the challenge of living a less wasteful life accessible and fun for everyone. My work has convinced me that there's nothing more meaningful in the fight against food waste than the many small victories that can happen in our own kitchens. This book will give you the resources that you need to start winning your own fight against waste in the most meaningful ways possible and I bet you'll find yourself saving money, eating healthier, and appreciating food more too!"
— Ben Simon, founder and CEO of Imperfect produce
"I love everything about Jill Lightner's Scraps, Peels, and Stems: the brilliant writing, the delicious recipes, and most of all, the commonsense approach to an enormously important subject that has, until now, received little attention: the serious problem of food waste. Enlightening, absorbing, and inspiring, Scraps, Peels, and Stems is a must-have addition to every kitchen bookshelf."
— Elissa Altman, author of Poor Man's Feast