9 Ways To Save Serious Money While Eliminating Your Food Waste (2024)

You've probably spent a lifetime chucking banana peels into the trash—but they're actually a culinary staple in other cultures, and they're packed with nutrients like vitamin A, B vitamins, and lutein. The easiest way to incorporate them into your diet? Toss a whole banana—peel and all—into a smoothie. Here's a simple recipe to try tomorrow morning.

Most chard recipes instruct you to use the leaves but discard the fibrous, rainbow-colored stems. Instead, grab a few glass jars and make these super-easy chard stem pickles from Heartbeet Kitchen. The brine comes together with a couple of pantry staples, and after a few hours in the fridge, you've got an irresistibly crunchy (and super-low-calorie!) snack.

Juice pulp—the stuff that's left after you send produce through a juicer—can actually give your favorite comfort foods a serious nutritional boost. This genius baked manicotti recipefrom blogger Becky Olsen of Project Domestication incorporates veggie juice pulp into the ricotta cheese filling, boosting fiber and nutrients—and keeping pulp out of the trash.

Resist the urge to pour that past-expiration-date milk down the drain. The truth is that sour milk is perfectly safe to eat and won't make you sick (unless it's got fuzzy green stuff floating around inside—then you should steer clear). In fact, its acidic flavor adds complexity to baked goods like muffins, quick breads, and these super-simple pancakes. Get the full recipefrom The Waste-Free Kitchen Handbookhere.

Here's an awesome magic trick: You can transform the veggie scraps you always throw out (we're talking carrot peels, onion skins, herb stems, and more) into insanely delicious vegetable stock—and you don't have to spend a penny. Seriously! Just collect veggie scraps in a gallon-size zippered bag in the freezer. Once you've amassed enough, use this no-fuss recipe from The Garden of Eating, plus some good old-fashioned tap water, and you'll have homemade stock. (Use the homemade stock in one of these veggie-packed soup recipes.) You can leave those pricey, overly salty boxes at the store.

Black-and-brown bananas usually end up in one of two places: the trash can or a loaf of banana bread. There's nothing wrong with banana bread, of course—but isn't it a little been-there-done-that? Enter these decadent baked doughnuts from Lorimer Street Kitchen: They're sweetened with applesauce and mashed bananas and topped with an addictive maple glaze and toasted coconut. In other words, they're anything but boring banana bread.

If there were a Ten Commandments of waste-free cooking, make pesto would probably be No. 1. With a handful of nuts, some olive oil, and a few garlic cloves, just about any greens (even wilted ones!) can form the backbone of pesto sauce. This recipe from Larder Love gives oft-wasted carrot greens the pesto treatment—and the results are totally delicious.

So many pumpkin recipes call for almost a full can of puree—and so many of us dutifully save the remaining puree for some future use...only to completely forget that it's sitting at the back of the fridge. Not anymore: This clean, no-bake energy ball recipe from Running to the Kitchen is the perfect home for that last half cup of unused pumpkin. Bonus: It takes only 10 minutes from start to finish.

The broccoli stem is just as delicious as the far more popular florets—and just as versatile, too. Chop it up for a raw veggie snack, roast it in the oven, or turn it into low-calorie, nutrient-packed veggie noodles. This recipe from What's Cooking Good Looking shows you how to make the noodles (and dress them in a bright, fresh broccoli pesto!).