How to make the most of out-of-date food and leftovers
Poet and artist Frieda Hughes hates wasting food – here are her top tips on how not to...
EVERYTHING SOUP
Into the pot I toss post-Christmas and New Year’s feasting,
Yellowing broccoli, courgettes, the puckered skins of which
Must be removed, and exhausted onions fried with sprouting garlic,
Blended with homemade gravy extracted from the boil of turkey bones
And the juice of a roasting, to become a soup of some importance
When it might have all been wasted; old food given new life.
Two huskies chew down on broccoli stalks as I wield a knife
To slice over-dried dates that have been soaking to soften,
And peel browning bananas, sweet beneath their papery skins,
Mashing them with out-of-date walnuts into a gluten-free cake
As good as any professional makes when buttered.
Stale bread means a motorbike ride to Bala Lake
To feed jackdaws and seagulls in the bitter spike of cold
Before the floods chase sheep to higher ground.
Snow falls. I am quilted against the flatlining temperature
For a lunch at which the most perfect mounds of caviar
Mounted on miniature blinis, and the tenderest
Boiled quails’ eggs in the thinnest of pastry cups
Devour my attention before the meal begins,
And there is no soup.