Well Wednesdays - Waste-busting Casserole with Joanna

Company Director, Joanna Stroud, cooked a fantastic, filling casserole for the whole Stroud Resourcing team this week for our Well Wednesday get-together. As well as a delicious lunch, it was also an opportunity to start a conversation about food waste. Here’s what Jo said:

“Well-Wednesday is part of our Health & Wellbeing Program but it’s not just about sharing healthy recipes with colleagues, it’s also about promoting more affordable and efficient ways to eat. Putting leftover or old vegetables into the trash is a major source of landfill waste. Finding ways to recycle fruits and vegetables can make a significant dent in the amount of waste your household generates, and mean you waste less money on uneaten food.

As a result of the long, low-temperature cooking, slow cookers help tenderize less-expensive cuts of meat, and slow-cooking really brings out the flavour in foods. Loads of foods can be cooked in a slow cooker, including one pot meals, soups, stews, and casseroles. It even uses less electricity than an oven!

I cheated today as this morning was frantic with 2 children under 7 to get ready and used a sausage casserole recipe mix (45 pence) adding 300 ml of water. The sausages were a specific purchase for this meal but all the vegetables (onions, mushroom, sweet potatoes, mangetout, sugar snaps, carrots, white onion were at the bottom of my fridge vegetable box), I simply selected what was past or near its sell-by date.

I am obsessed with not wasting food, in the summer I switch to make quiches which are a great way to incorporate unused vegetables and all year round we make vegetable curries.”

If you're looking for some inspiration for slow cooker recipes as the winter nights close in, here are 10 top tips for slow cookers https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/10-top-tips-using-slow-cooker