Cooking without recipes is a great way to reduce waste in the kitchen because it helps to use up all sorts of odds and ends. Soups, stews and smoothies are the obvious starting points, but, as your confidence grows, you can learn to adapt trickier recipes such as baked goods to use up a wider range of the ingredients in your pantry. My five-year-old daughter loves to invent recipes with me, and we recently made muffins using some brown bananas (her idea) and a variety of flours, dried fruit, nuts and seeds.
