Recently we wrote about Ikea Canada’s Scrapbook, a cookbook with recipes that use food scraps to make delicious meals and snacks to promote zero-waste living. Now we present to you The No-Waste Vegetable Cookbook: Recipes and Techniques for Whole Plant Cooking by Linda Ly.
In the preface, Ly says that she deals with “farm food,” a cuisine in which “creativity and resourcefulness does not equal frugality and blandness. It’s understanding that a vegetable begins with the sprouts and does not end until the tubers, vines, leaves, flowers, fruits, and seeds have given their all.”
Ly wants us to reconsider how we see stalks, stems, leaves, pods, and seeds. The book is full of ideas on how to utilize the entire plant, as the title suggests. Broccoli leaves can be used to wrap falafel and tomato leaves add an earthly flavor to sauces. The No-Waste Vegetable Cookbook also includes pesto-making charts that help readers create pestos out of a variety of unorthodox ingredients.
Ly is grateful to her Vietnamese immigrant parents for instilling in her a “top-to-tail” mentality when it comes to cooking. She remembers being jealous of neighbors who made convenient meals from cans and boxes while her household was rinsing rice, chopping vegetables, and preparing whole fish. Now she realizes how fortunate she is for having this ideology in the kitchen and hopes to share this no-waste mindset with her readers.
If you are looking to jump-start a zero-waste lifestyle, then this cookbook is a great resource to help you shift your habits!
