How to save £60 a month on your food shop

Vegetables

Potatoes – 4.4 million wasted every day

Potatoes are the most commonly thrown away food in the UK. If they’ve gone soft, mushy, wrinkly, cracked, green or mouldy, don’t eat them. But if they’ve just started to sprout little shoots, no worries, just chop them off and use them in any of our delicous potato recipes. If you have leftover mash, you can use it in bubble and squeak, fishcakes or potato pancakes.

Root vegetables

Almost 100 thousand tonnes of carrots are thrown away every year in the UK. If you find you’re throwing root veggies away, try making a batch of vegetable soup for lunches. A tray of roast root veg eats well cold and goes in sandwiches, salads and grain bowls. Even the trimmings of your vegetables can be frozen in a bag to make free veg stock. Top tip for reviving carrots: put them in a glass of water in the fridge until they are less shrivelled; they’re not perfect but they’ll be usable again.

Fridge vegetables

If you’ve got a fridge drawer full of tired veg, fear not. Broccoli, peppers and mushrooms are high on the list of wasted veg, but there are lots of ways to use up odds and ends in our fridge-raid recipes, from saag aloo to savoury pancakes. Don’t use vegetables if they become slimy or mouldy.

Fresh herbs and spices

Chopped herbs don’t last long and if you forget to use them they will become slimy, yellow and unusable. You can freeze herbs, chillies and ginger and then grate, chop or crumble them into your cooking straight from frozen.