Whoaaa… it’s almost 2026! But before we dive into a new year, a year when hopefully we’ll all waste less food (hoping!), I’m taking a minute to review the workhorse recipes that helped me prevent food waste in 2025. I made each of these more times than I could count in the past year. What worked in your house? Email me: [email protected].
Building lunch around random leftovers
I love batting cleanup at lunch time, and this probably prevents food waste more than anything else I do in my kitchen. Depending on what I’ve got (including random small portions stashed in the freezer), I might supplement with a protein (egg, beans, tinned fish and cottage cheese are my go-tos), frozen or fresh veggies or an apple to round out the meal. Honestly, most of my lunches are like this. Here’s a recent meal: a small bit of carrots and rice, mixed with roasted squash topped with cottage cheese, nutritional yeast, fried sage leaves (from sage originally purchased for another recipe) and pistachios. If improv with what you have is intimidating, check out this guide from a culinary instructor.
“Sour” milk pancakes
As long as there’s milk to use up, these pancakes are on regular dinner rotation in our house. They’re designed to use milk that’s on the edge, but we more often make them with milk we’ve frozen before going out of town. Milk doesn’t defrost well for drinking, but it’s perfectly fine for pancakes! This recipe uses whole grain flour and makes a bunch. I freeze the extras, which, after a quick jaunt in the toaster oven, make cozy snacks and on-the-go breakfasts. One innovation we’ve made this year is to use extra yogurt in the batter too. So, when a yogurt tub is nearly empty, I slosh some water around in it until the yogurt has loosened from the sides and then freeze that “yogurt water,” for future pancakes. (And credit where credit is due: this yogurt idea came to me from an entrant to the Food Waste Prevention Week Cooking Challenge, which I was glad to help organize again in 2025!)
Clear-Out-the-Kitchen Oatmeal Cookies
These cookies are amazing at clearing your cupboards and beyond! I’ve made them with shredded coconut, halva, marshmallows and even broken Triscuits. My favorite ingredient to add is the powder at the bottom of bags of cereal. Seriously, these cookies will make you feel like you’re conjuring dessert from thin air. My only caveat is that a handful of chocolate chips and raisins are essential!
Fast banana muffins
I love these muffins because they achieve the same goals of banana bread, but without the long spell in the oven. They also skip the flour and are built on just overripe bananas, nut butter and eggs with no added sugar. The original recipe is from the Perfectly Good Food cookbook, (purchases at that link support EatOrToss and independent bookstores) which is also posted on the authors’ website, Food Waste Feast. Still, I’ve riffed even further. For example, I’ve made the recipe with a blended slurry of random fruit instead of bananas (if you try it that way, I suggest lots of raisins to account for sweetness and some oats to add body). And, like the pancakes mentioned above, these freeze well so can be quick snacks as needed.
Scrappy broth
I virtually never buy broth. Veggie scraps and sometimes bones all land in a bag in the freezer. When it’s full, we boil it for broth. Even when soup isn’t on the immediate horizon, I try to use the scrappy broth relatively quickly, by swapping it in for water when I’m making rice or quinoa. I was so efficient at using my scrappy broth that I did have to buy one carton of veggie stock for Thanksgiving this year!
