5 ingredients challenge- don’t waste food (+delicious recipe)

Hey friends,

I really wanted to bring awareness to food waste. So much of perfectly fine food is being thrown away every day, while in other places of the world there are so many plagued with hunger. I know this is such a large scale issue, but I truly believe that if we all do our part, we can make a difference.

Less food waste

One way I try to reduce my food waste is by planning out my food for the week and shopping for groceries very strategically. So I’m not just walking into the store without a plan and buying random things that look good (which often results in ingredients that don’t go together). If you want to know my strategy and tips on efficient shopping, check out my blog post and video. But even when I plan my ingredients and meals I still do sometimes have ingredients that are leftover and completely random.

BUT I encourage you guys not to let those ingredients go to waste. Try to get creative and piece a meal together with those ingredients.

Ingredients Challenge

So to bring awareness to food waste and to show you that making something delicious out of seemingly random ingredients is possible, I created this Ingredients Challenge. My boyfriend was to pick out 5 random ingredients from the store and I have to try to make a dish out of it.

The rules were:

1. I had to use all the 5 given ingredients

2. I was allowed to use condiments like oils and spices

3. I was allowed to use pantry items like onion, garlic or flour

4. I was allowed to choose one of the following carbohydrates as a base: rice, pasta or bread

So what I was given was: Kidney beans, plain hummus, canned mushrooms, zucchini and tomato.

And surprisingly what I came up with turned out delicious! What it is, you’ll see in a second 🙂 I was really proud of how creative I was able to be with it.

So here I am turning my creative experiment into a recipe to share with you guys.

It was truly so much fun that I want to encourage you to get creative in the kitchen and I’d love it if you show me your creations! Tag me on Instagram and I’ll message you 🙂

So let’s get to the recipe:

Ingredients

• 2 tomatoes
• 1 zucchini
• 175g plain hummus
• 100g drained canned mushrooms
• 400g canned kidney beans
• 4 cloves of minced garlic
• 300g spaghetti
• 2 tsp dried oregano
• 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
• 2 tbsp flour
• salt and pepper
• 2 tbsp olive oil

Instructions

1. Rinse and drain the kidney beans. Cut up 3 or 4 pieces of the canned mushroom. Mash the beans in a bowl and add 1 tbsp of olive oil, the nutritional yeast, half of the minced garlic, 1 tsp oregano, the cut up mushrooms and salt and pepper. Mix everything up and set aside.
2. On a plate add the flour. Shape the Kidney bean mixture into small patties or balls and coat with the flour and set aside. Do this with all of the bean mixture.
3. Heat up a pan with some olive oil and fry the bean patties until slightly golden brown on the outside. Then set aside.
4. While the patties are in the pan, cut up the zucchini, tomato and mushrooms into bite-sized pieces. Once the patties are out of the pan, add the veggies and the other half of the minced garlic to the pan and fry until everything has softened. Season with salt, pepper and 1 tsp of dried oregano. Then add the hummus to the pan. Mix to combine.
5. Cook the Pasta according to the package instructions and save a cup of pasta water when draining the pasta. Add a splash of the pasta water to the hummus veggie mixture to loosen everything up. Add the cooked pasta to the pan with the veggies and coat the pasta evenly in the sauce.
6. Plate up the paste and arrange the kidney bean patties on top.

Hope you enjoyed the recipe and are inspired to be a little creative with your ingredients and are more aware of food waste.

Please share this with a friend and like it if you did.

I wish you all a lovely day!

X

Silvia