an aussie in austria

I have a bit of an obsession with food wastage – as I’ve already mentioned in a previous blog, it kind of upsets me. In an ideal world, I shop once a week and have a basic idea of what I’m going to eat each day. Back in my bachelorette days this often resulted in very boring weekday meals. Because if I bought a whole broccoli, then I was forced to eat broccoli almost every night to use it up.

The more people you have in your household, the more variety you can purchase without wastage. And when you’re just one… well it can make it difficult.

With two people in our household now, sometimes the old problem pokes its head up again. Because unlike me, my husband is not happy eating steak and broccoli four nights a week. Which is fair enough. I try and plan a couple of meals for the weekdays, and it’s always easy to cook up a quick stir fry if there’s random vegetables left over.

But my obsession with not wasting food has led to some not so tasty, but in retrospective kind of hilarious meals.

My favourite happened when I was living in a sharehouse with a guy who was a chef… which makes this story all the more mortifying. Not surprisingly he hardly ever cooked at home, but that didn’t stop him turning up his nose at my creations. Like something I dubbed… Cabbage Surprise. On this particular day, I had a lot of cabbage left over, some eggs and not much else. So I thought… well I’ll turn it into a frittata. Boom. Turns out I don’t really understand the elements that go into making a frittata, because frying up some cabbage, scrambling in some (nowhere near enough) eggs and expecting it to turn into some kind of gourmet meal is definitely not what happened. Not even when I added sweet chili sauce.

I have had some wins… broccoli fritters came into my life for the soul purpose of using up leftover broccoli. Although that time I used a recipe and had almost all the ingredients. They turned out so well that I often make this to use up leftover broccoli or cauliflower. Quick, healthy and yum.

But recently I found myself with an excess of zucchini, and I was hungry. So I figured I would translate the fritters recipe into zucchini fritters. I didn’t want to add too many breadcrumbs and make it unhealthy… so I skimped on that. Turns out that zucchini is a lot wetter than broccoli or cauliflower, so what I ended up with was more like a sloppy mess that almost had to be scrambled to be cooked.

Unlike the original Cabbage Surprise, my zucchini fritters did taste ok (just ok, I won’t be making them again). But in case you’re wondering, all the Cabbage Surprise I made back then got eaten… every last bit. Though in the interest of full disclosure, maybe I did share some with my dog… and he enjoyed it immensely.