Ok, since you guys were so great coming up with ideas for lettuce last month, here’s a related one: cucumber.

Like with the lettuce, we don’t eat enough salad to get through a whole cucumber before it goes mushy and horrible – we find it pretty hard to even get through a half-cucumber unless we’re on an utter salad binge.

So once we’ve eaten our fill of it, what else can we do with it? There is the cliche cucumber-on-eye thing I guess and I have a suspicion you can use them in face masks – but any more concrete ideas?

(Photo by woodsy)

I read a good article the other day about how to avoid wasting food including bread, cream, rice and pasta.

I’m a big believer in using up leftovers, particularly in the form of soup or soup related products – but as much as I love soupery, I’m a little sceptical about the comment in the article saying that “even salads” can be soupified.

While I can find a few recipes for different lettuce soups – and am impressed with the suggestions of using up the often wasted outer leaves and inner most bits, I’m still not sure I fancy giving it a bash.

But leftover lettuce is often an issue in our house – if we get a couple of different types of lettuce to have an interesting salad, they start to go limp before we get through them. I guess it’s the mass of people in a similar position that has led to the huge popularity of bagged salad – but we’d rather not go down that route.

So what else can we do with the leftover lettuce? Obviously it can go in the compost heap but if we can use it up before that stage, it would be good.

(Photo by lusi)

A bit of an obvious one considering the date.

So presumably people scooped out the seeds for eating/planting, and made soups or pies or other yummy things from the flesh before carving the skin into a Halloween lantern — but what can be done with the outer casing afterwards?

Obviously it’s a firm contender for the compost heap but I wondered if there was anything else it could be used for instead.

A container for growing plants in the greenhouse over winter that can then be planted out in the ground in the spring? Can it be dried into anything fun?

(Photo by cybersnot)