We’ve covered very, very brown bananas before but I was reading a Mrs Beeton-style book on home management from the 1930s the other day (as you do), and I saw a reference to using banana skins to clean brown leather shoes.

According to the hefty tome (which also includes chapters on engaging servants, etiquette for women and fortune-telling – all essential to the 1930s homemaker), rubbing the inside of a banana skin on brown leather shoes helps feed the leather. A bit of Googling seems to corroborate this and adds that the same idea can also be applied to silverware.

Any other cunning ways to reuse banana peel?

(We’ve covered orange peel before – that’s got loads of reuses…)

We’ve had an email from Jayne:

What can I do with corn cobs? Seems such a waste to throw them in the bin after we’ve eaten the kernels. Compost?

Yes, they can be composted but since the core is usually pretty tough when the ears reach maturity (sweet corn cob as opposed to baby corn stage), they’ll probably take quite a while to rot down – chop them up to speed up the process but they’re still not going to be the fastest. (Some people get around this sort of problem by keeping two types of compost heap – one for things that will rot quickly, and one for things that will rot slowly. The first will provide regular compost for the garden, the second will produce it eventually too but the main purpose is to keep the first pile clutter-free – and keep other stuff out of landfill of course.)

Apparently they can be shredded and used as fibre in cattle fodder, burned into charcoal and on a large scale, can be used to make a industrial chemical compound.

Any suggestions for things more useful around the home?

We’ve had an email from Catelin:

I misfired with a bag of pasta yesterday and it went all over the floor instead of into the pan! With our dogs, the ten second rule definitely does not apply so we can’t eat it now but I can’t bring myself to just throw it away either.

What can I do with it? Can I compost it?

It’s probably ok to go on the compost heap – because our compost heap is very close to our house, I’m overly cautious and I usually say don’t compost cooked pasta in an open heap or bin in case it (or rather stuff it’s been cooked with) attracts vermin, but not-cooked stuff should be fine.

Aside from that, you might be able to reuse it in a non-culinary situation. We’ve used dry pasta in place of poker chips (worked fine until John started eating his pieces) and of course kids can use it to make art – macaroni being the most common for that but other shapes like bows (farfalle), shells (conchiglie), and twists (fusilli) would work just as well. Kids could also use tubular pasta – like penne and tortiglioni – for threading practise (be warned: you might end up with a billion pasta necklaces…).

Any other suggestions?

Following on last week’s water–themed posts (in honour of World Water Day yesterday), we’ve had a related-but-different email from Meiko:

I really like the idea behind your site and I’ve been reading all your past suggestions. Here is a small question for you (maybe too irrelevant to consider).

I have a bottle of orange blossom water (to use as a flavouring in desserts and cakes) whose taste I really don’t like (tastes too much like chemicals, not like natural flavouring). But there’s a lot of it and it does smell nice, so I don’t feel like
throwing it away.

Do you have an idea of how I could use it to make something smell nice?

Nothing is too irrelevant for this site ;)

I had the same problem with some rose water a while ago but unfortunately the strong scent – whether fake or otherwise – got in the way of many of my first reuse idea – using it as a facial toner: bringing the scent closer to my nose, not wise ;)

I suspect it could be used in soap making or the like, or in a spray bottle as a quick-and-easy air freshener – the strong smell might be more palatable in those places.

Any other ideas?

It’s World Water Day on Sunday so this week’s Recycle This is water themed.

Following on from Monday’s reuses for bath/shower water and Wednesday’s, hot, clean water, I thought we’d feature cooking water today – the stuff leftover after boiling vegetables or pasta etc.

Like with the freshly boiled water from Wednesday, it seems a waste of power to just power it down the drain when we’re done.

With pasta or potatoes, the water is often starchy and with veg such as broccoli, the water can be “discoloured” from the veg itself – so not really suitable for washing stuff.

So is there anything that can be done with it? I know some people use veg water as the liquid when making stock but what else?