Minimising Waste on Pancake Day
Top Tips
Today is Shrove Tuesday (AKA “Pancake Day”)! Did you know that pancakes were traditionally eaten on this day to use up rich, indulgent foods such as eggs and milk before 40 days of fasting began?
The recycle-more Team LOVE pancakes so, to mark this annual custom, we have put together the following tips on how you can be less wasteful (which also tie in with the underlying waste not message behind the Shrove Tuesday custom).
Eggshells
One of the main pancake making ingredients is eggs, which means you will be left with a lot of shells. These can be put into your food recycling container or kitchen caddy; however, eggshells have many uses:
- They quickly decompose in the compost pile and add valuable calcium and other minerals to the soil in the process
- Crushed eggshells can be scattered around your plants and flowers to help deter plant-eating slugs and snails without have to use eco-unfriendly pesticides
- Crushed eggshells can be kept in your kitchen sink strainer at all times. They trap additional solids and they gradually break up and help to naturally clean your pipes on their way down the drain
Freezing Leftovers
It’s so easy to make a large number of pancakes, which means that you may end up with leftovers. The great thing about pancakes is that you can freeze them and have them for lunch or breakfast another day.
Pancakes should be frozen separately by putting them one by one onto a baking sheet and placing them into the freezer. That way they will not stick to each other when you are ready to eat them. It’s always nice to know that there is a bag of pancakes in the freezer for those days when you don’t feel like cooking.
If you plan to batch cook pancakes for freezing you will need:
- Parchment paper
- Baking sheet
- Freezer-safe bag or container
- Permanent marker
Lemon Skins
A much loved topping for pancakes is sugar and lemon juice. If this is your pancake accompaniment of choice, please avoid putting too many lemon skins into your compost bin, as overfilling it with citrus fruits can make the compost overly acidic. The worms and plants won’t thank you for it.
Instead, you could grate the peel to use as zesty pieces in future baking, or make candied lemon peel for snacking on / cake-decorating.
Another tip is to dry the skins to add fragrance to homemade potpourri.
Overripe Bananas
People are getting more adventurous when it comes to pancake toppings. If you have some brown, spotty bananas in your fruit bowl you could whip up some fluffy pancakes with banana. Slice the bananas into thin rounds for toppings and / or mash some into the batter. Delicious! You could even go stateside and fry up any leftover bacon rashers from your Sunday cooked breakfast as a nice, salty accompaniment to your sweet treat.
Recipes
It’s good to think of all the left over foods we can use up when making pancakes and picking the fillings, but what do you do with the left over batter? What if there’s an alternative to wasting it?
Here’s some recipes ideas to help inspire putting the left over batter to good, tasty use before you have to suffer giving up it all up for lent.
Pancakes to-go: you can add anything from chocolate chips to a touch of lemon zest and is ideal for when you’ve got a bowl of pancake batter lying around.
Left over Pancake breakfast sandwich
These go best with bacon, and for those who like the sweet-salty life, could be worth having some dipping syrup on the side. Or chopped up fruit like blueberries and strawberry, to start your day with 1 of your 5!
More of a banana and chocolate chip cookie, but a great recipe to make if Tesco had an offer on pancake mix.
Sub some of that butter for peanut butter and you will not regret it (unless you hate peanut butter)
Basically, just pancakes in a different form, but make for a great addition to a fondue smorgasbord.
For more inspiration, visit the Love Food Hate Waste website and type pancake recipes into the search facility. Here you’ll find a number of filling and topping ideas for both sweet and savoury pancakes. Enjoy!
If you have any other reuse or recycling tips please contact us. We would love to hear from you.
