We’ve started getting a meat box delivery from Swillington Farm – a local organic farm. All the meat is organic, the animals have been treated well during their lives and the food miles are very low — in fact for the chicken we had over the weekend, the only food miles were the ones delivering it here to us (about 15miles, and they deliver to other people in the area during the same trip) – but it is considerably more expensive than buying from a cheap meat from a supermarket. We’re careful about food waste anyway when it’s expensive, we’re doubly careful about making use out of every single bit of it!

So the main meat portions have been eaten or frozen to be eaten later this month, the giblets & skin cooked into a pate for the cats, and the carcass has been picked over for meat then slow cooked into a stock. But is there anything I can do with the bones after the stock?

I know some people with sealed composting systems/bokashi bins add bones to that. As we have an open (or at least not full sealed) bin and live near woodland, I’d worry about foxes (especially as our live and considerably more meaty chickens are nearby). But to get the bones into the garden, I know some people make their own bonemeal fertiliser from old chicken/other animal bones — has anyone done that? If so, any advice or things to avoid?

I’ve also heard about people using chicken carcasses for catching fish or crayfish – but I think the idea is that they’re raw and a bit stinky; these picked-clean cooked bones might not be enticing enough. Again, anyone know?

Any other suggestions?

Over on the Really Good Life the other day, I listed all the consumables I used in one day and their packaging. I think it’s easy to become blind to things you routinely use and listing them helped me realise where I was creating unnecessary waste/exposing myself to unnecessary synthetic chemicals in my day to day life. I’m going to do the exercise again a few times over the next couple of weeks to get a more accurate broader picture (for example, on the first day, I didn’t do any household cleaning or laundry, or much cooking).

The reason I’m mentioning it here is two-fold — firstly, I thought it was a useful exercise and I’d recommend it anyone wanting to reduce. Secondly, I categorised my teabags as “probably not compostable” so possibly destined for landfill, which caused a bit of discussion in the comments (we do actually compost our teabags but not without a little hesitation). As I mentioned over there, Alice in Blogland looked into the issue a few years ago and found that teabags often include synthetic material in the heat sealed bit – the paper bag and the leaves are but not everyone wants synthetic materials in their compost heap. Without the heat sealed bit (typically food grade polypropylene), the bags wouldn’t stay sealed during manufacture and use.

It’s four years since Alice’s research though and the corporate world has made many green(washing) steps forward since then – so I thought it might be useful to check the situation again. I contacted ten tea companies and asked them whether I could compost their tea bags. Here are the responses:

Tetley

Tetley got back to me very, very quickly – which makes me think they get asked this question quite a lot:

The material used to make the actual tea bag is a mixture of mainly cellulose fibres and a small amount of polypropylene fibres to give the heat seal. Under normal composting conditions the cellulose fibres will break down, as will the tea, leaving the very small polypropylene fibres which are normally so small they are not seen. It does however take a reasonable amount of time to do this and really needs to be placed into a ‘proper’, established compost heap.

If it has not broken down it may be because:

• It has not been left long enough
• It hasn’t spent enough time at the centre of the heap where the temperature is higher
• It has been put on the garden, not on a compost heap
• It hasn’t been mixed with enough vegetable or organic matter
• The worm population is not high enough

The packs themselves are not compostable. We are working with our packaging suppliers on an ongoing basis as they are currently unable to supply us with fully biodegradable packaging that we can use for our packs. Comments like yours actually help us keep the pressure on our suppliers to produce a solution.

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I spotted this question on the Money Saving Expert forums earlier today:

I bought some ginger wine from sainsburys to try but it is far too sweet. I don’t want to waste it, but I can’t stand to drink it. Any ideas what else I can do with it?

Other forum posters suggested using a splash of it in brandy and hot water to make a winter cocktail, or with ice in lemonade for a summery one. Another suggestion is to use it to make a ginger-y trifle.

Any other ideas?

Karen left a question on the Suggest an Item page:

Hi! I found out of date instant soup packets. Any ideas?

I presume by “out of date” Karen means its beyond the “best before” date – and if so, chances are, that soup is just fine and will be just fine for a good while after the marked date. (The UK government has announced they’re going to get rid of “best before” dates to reduce food waste – let people make their own judgements about whether stuff is fine to eat/drink or not, however long it is since it was produced. “Use by” dates on fresh food will remain but “best before” and “display until” [a stock rotation guide for shops] are disappearing. Anyway, back to Karen’s soup…)

If the soup is still good despite being “out of date”, then as well as being used as just soup, it could be used in place of stock in certain recipes – the flavour of the soup will obviously dictate where it can/should be used but it’s quite commonly used in casseroles and Google tells me that some people use (presumably beef-y, onion or mushroom) mixes to add flavour to meat when making hamburgers or tacos etc.

I know a lot of people reading this will prefer to make soups from scratch at home but does anyone have any other ideas for things Karen could do with the soup?

We’ve had an email from Janet:

I love your site – it really inspires me to go to lengths to reuse and recycle things I never thought I could, and since I’m a student, that’s wisely frugal too!

I have a bit of a blind spot with cake baking, and they always come out unrisen and heavy, and doughy in the middle. Any ideas how I can reuse this (and other) lemon flavoured brick-cake?

You did cakes before, but focussed mainly on dry and stale cakes (breadcrumbs, biscotti etc)…obviously this is not going to work for me :D

Since the 3Rs always starts with reducing, we should think about reducing the occurrences of these sad brick-cakes ;)

I don’t make sponges that often so can’t be specific with my advice but one thing I will say that’s good general baking advice is check the temperature of your oven with a separate thermometer. Borrow one if you can but they’re only a couple of ££/$$ on eBay if you have to buy one – and they’re well worth it — everyone I know who has used one found that their oven thermostat was rather wrong: ours was off by about 30°C! That sort of temperature difference can make a heck of a difference when baking. Any more cake-specific advice on why Janet might be hitting the not-rising/doughy middle problem a lot?

As for reuses, could they be served as a heavy tart like pudding with cream? Or warm with custard as a pudding? A few sites also suggest bodging it by slicing the cake in half then stacking one piece on top of the other and adding a layer of cream & jam or buttercream in the middle to fake a bit of height. It still would be rather dense though.

Any other suggestions for using it up?