How to Prevent Waste in The Kitchen During the Holidays

The holidays are an amazing time for cooking and baking delicious classics. With all the hustle and bustle also comes a lot of waste. Here are some tips to help you navigate a more eco-conscious kitchen while creating your favorite dishes.

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Plan Your Dishes Ahead of Time

Before you go crazy with making any food, it’s important to have a plan for what you are going to make. Think about how many people you are serving, what food they might like to have, what you will need to refrigerate, etc. Having a plan helps guide you to only buy and use what you need, which helps save food waste. Going into the store with a guide of what to get also alleviates a ton of stress!

You don’t have to have the exact measurements down when you’re shopping, but if you’re planning on only making a double batch of cookies, maybe you don’t need five bags of flour. Take time to compare each recipe and roughly estimate how much you’ll need. Of course things like flour or sugar can be used after the holidays, but try not to over buy on specialty ingredients that you won’t use if you have extra leftover.

Opt for Reusables for Cooking and Baking

A pretty easy option to save waste in the kitchen is to opt for more reusable items. It can be convenient to buy those little loaf pans for your holiday banana bread, but those pans typically can’t be recycled if they have food stuck to them. One neat option for this is to find some ceramic loaf pans at the thrift store. That way when you bring your goodies to the party, your host gets a bonus gift to keep and reuse. You can do this with any food you bring to a holiday party.

Things like silicone baking sheets, reusable pie tins and loaf pans, bowl covers, and even beeswax wrap are great options for saving and storing food. Silicone muffing liners are such a fun swap, and I feel like you can get more use out of them than typical paper liners with the silicone not sticking to your food as much. If you feel like you go through a lot of paper towels when cleaning things up, check out these Swedish dish cloths that you can reuse and even compost when done with them. They’re incredibly absorbent too. I swear this is one of my favorite swaps ever that has saved me tons of money.

Swap Out Single Use Items for Better Options

The amount of cling wrap, parchment and wax paper, and plastic bags that get used during the holidays is insane. All of these products are things that cannot be recycled so they end up in a landfill. One thing you can do is swap some of these single use plastic items for options that are less harmful on your health and the environment.

Nowadays there are tons of companies that sell compostable parchment paper and unbleached paper baking liners. These options are better for your health and better for the planet since they can be composted at home and commercially. There are also options to buy recycled tin foil rather than getting the virgin stuff.

If you’re hosting a holiday party, invest in or make your own reusable napkins, and try to avoid styrofoam and plastic plates, bowls, and silverware. These options may be easier on you than doing all of your dishes, but it will save you money by not purchasing them and instead just using what you have. If you really want to get single use items for your gathering, I don’t blame you, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to save yourself a little time to enjoy the party. Luckily, there are many unbleached paper options that are compostable.

Conserve Energy When Cooking

A tip to help you save energy when cooking and baking is to consider the size of the pots and pans you are using. If you cook in a pot that is too big for what you are making, you end up heating up a larger area that what you need, which can prolong cook time. Cooking your food in the appropriate sized vessel is going to help your dish turn out better and also potentially save energy.

Another tip is to bake things at the same time when possible. If you know you’re going to need your oven for a few dishes, compare cook temperatures and times to see when you can pair things together. Running your oven all day can really add to your energy bill.

Try to also be more mindful of water use when doing the dishes. This might seem like a pretty simple tip, but it can be tough when you have a lot of food to make. Using the “fill the sink” method is great for this. You fill the sink with your warm soapy water and put a stopper in the drain. Then you can soak and scrub your dishes while not running the water the whole time. You only run it when you go to rinse. Most dishwashers nowadays also have an eco or quick cycle, so feel free to try that out to help save energy too.

Compost What You Can

I absolutely love composting. In the winter it can be tough for some, but I am fortunate enough to have a local company that picks up my food scraps for me year round. Composting your extra food and paper scraps is such a great thing to be able to do for the environment. Since we’ve started doing this, we take out our garbage wayyy less than ever before, and it also causes us to be more conscious about the food we don’t eat.

Like I’ve mentioned, food waste is a big problem in general and even bigger around the holidays. The more we can do to divert our food scraps from going into a landfill, the better. If you can’t compost, that’s okay! There are lots of other things mentioned in this blog post for you to do instead, like freezing your food scraps for broth, or repurposing your scraps into a different baked dish. If you compost your scraps at home and add the compost to your garden, good for you! I seriously envy your motivation and craftiness. But for the rest of us that are too lazy to do so or just don’t have the means to do it, there are plenty of other ways to make a difference.

Ways to Repurpose Food Scraps

Before you go to chuck your scraps into the compost, don’t toss them just yet! There are many ways you can get use out of your food scraps before discarding them.

Veggie scraps make the best veggie broth. Homemade veggie broth and bone broth is liquid gold for all your winter soups and stews. It’s so much more flavorful than the store bought stuff too.

Save your leftover pastry and cutout cookie scraps to bake yourself a sweet treat. I always see people make cutout cookies and then discard the extra cut up dough. It’s seriously such a waste when you can get another few perfectly good cookies out of that! They might not be as pretty but you might as well use up what you made.

If you are using fruits in your holiday baking, before composting the scraps try making a simmer pot or winter fruit tea. My favorite way to do this is to make a citrus simmer pot and then strain it for an immune boosting tea. Steal this recipe and modify it for the fruit scraps you have on hand. This is such an easy and underrated hack to get something extra out of your fruit scraps.

Holiday Simmer Pot

• any fruit scraps you have: citrus, cranberries, pears, apples
• any spices you have on hand: cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, allspice
• any sweeteners if you’re making a tea: I prefer local honey
• vanilla extract (optional)

Get a pot of water boiling and toss it all in. Let it simmer for a while and get your house smelling cozy. Take it off the stove after 20-30 minutes and strain some of the liquid into your mug if you’re having tea.

Save Food Waste with Leftovers

Whenever I get together with my family for the holidays, they always have to send me home with leftovers. There have been many times where the host buys plastic food containers for this soul purpose. But what if we just got in the habit of bringing our own? This year I am starting the movement to bring my own reusable containers from home for any extra food I get from the party. Not only does this save unnecessary waste, but it saves space in your home by not collecting extra containers, and it even saves the host money. Everyone wins!

The other kind of obvious way to save food waste would be to freeze what you can to save for later. Some people might think this is nuts, but my mom has Christmas cookies in her freezer from last year lol. She even ate one last week and she said they tasted fresh! If you have the space in your freezer, I recommend saving extra leftovers if you think you will eat them. A great freezer-friendly storage option are Stasher bags. These silicone bags last forever and they can help save you space if you can’t fit a bulky container in your storage area.

I hope these ideas are helpful for when you are spending time in the kitchen this season. The holidays can be stressful enough as it is, so don’t worry if you aren’t able to incorporate all of these tips! I recommend choosing one or two to start with, and building from there as you get the hang of it. Let me know if you try any of these waste-saving tips or if you have any of your own practices!

-Kayla