Have you got a fridge full of leftovers that you would hate to see go to waste but just don’t know what to do with them? Or do you need some inspiration on what to make for dinner tonight?
To give you a helping hand to keep your leftovers and food waste in check, take a look at the ‘Love Your Leftovers’ App. This App is an initiative of Cumberland Council, in support of the NSW EPA ‘Love Food Hate Waste project’ and is seriously worth a look if you want to eliminate your food waste.
Love Your Leftovers – food waste App
How does the App work?
After opening the App, you’ll come up with a search screen where you can choose to either search by ‘leftover’ item or you can browse all recipes.
Typing an items name into the search function works well and by adding more items the number of recipes gets narrowed down. For example, there are 6 recipes in here that contain both eggs and parsley.
Searching by ‘all recipes’ or by category is very straightforward. For instance, choose the ‘Meat leftovers’ category and you’ll get a well set out list of all recipes you can choose from.
Clicking through the title into the recipe and you’ll have two tabs – ingredients and method. All very easy to follow and read (which is important when you are in the middle of cooking!).
At the bottom of the recipe is a helpful tip and here you can also add this recipe as a favourite, or if you want to go one step further and really utilise this App to its full potential add it to the meal planner or ingredients to shopping list.
The meal planner part is a great visual way of seeing what you have planned and you can use this to include your own meals (i.e. ones that are not recipes from this App). This enable a full picture of what your weekly meals will be.
The shopping list pulls all items together from the recipes you have chosen (and you can edit/delete off what you don’t need), and again there is the functionality to include your own separate items on here.
Overall verdict
I think the App visually looks fantastic and is very user friendly. The number of recipes may lack a little at this stage (there were only 29 in the ‘meat category’) but ‘Love Your Leftovers’ is currently asking home cooks to submit any great recipes that use leftovers so it is a continually growing database.
Using the meal planner and shopping list functions would take some getting used to but I think could provide a very handy tool to staying organised.
Overall, a highly useful App to help you stay on top of your potential food waste.
For more information on the App go to http://www.loveyourleftovers.nsw.gov.au/ or download it on the App Store of Google Play for FREE!