Well, if like me, you’re planning on having a few over for food and want to serve up some interesting finger food; Arancini are the perfect and elegant bite for when people are standing around with drinks.
They are deep-fried rice balls made from saffron risotto rice with a mozzarella centre. You can also fill them [...]

I have friends who very rarely, if ever, pay for their food. Instead, they go foraging through the skips and bins of Dublin city, picking up the mountains of perfectly good discarded food. It’s easy to sneer - ugh, eating from the bin? - but the food is usually well packaged or wrapped up; they don’t [...]

Now’s the best time of year for lamb. Lovely, lovely lamb, so tender and juicy - and pricy.
Last week, I picked up two lamb shanks for about €11.00 and made this recipe from BBC Food. It tastes as good as it looks, with the meat falling off the bone.
I’m always loathe to throw out any [...]

My husband was recording in the house over the weekend and we had about a million people over. I made a ricky load of chilli and rice to keep the troops going - the chilli was scoffed but I had loads of leftover rice. What to do with it?
Well, you can do a number of [...]

At last! I’ve finally discovered the answer to making good chicken stock, and you’re not going to like it. It’s salt. Simply cover your chicken carcass with well-salted cold water. Add an onion chopped in half along with a stick of celery and a whole carrot (if organic, no need to peel). Bring it to [...]

All Christmas I couldn’t stop thinking about food out of greed and now I can’t stop thinking about it out of fear. I live on the top of a mountain in West Wicklow and I’m snowed in - alone. I did make provisions last week and got copious amounts of food including an auxiliary ham [...]

This is just one of infinite ways to use up your leftover chicken, which I will sporadically update you with. The whole chicken thing is my saviour at the minute; I can literally eke it out for three days, for me, my partner and 11-year-old stepdaughter.
One thing I do splash out on in the first [...]

Lately I’m loving LoveFoodHateWaste.com, a UK government funded website full of great information about cutting down on your food waste. The site is full of great tips on what to do with leftovers, how to control portion size, and recipes.

Stocking up on fruit and veg at the weekend, I noticed that there were two very black bananas in our fruit basket.  I find black bananas extremely unpleasant to eat, but know from years of making Avoca’s Banana Bread that overripe bananas work really well in baking.  I did a bit of searching online to [...]

A few weeks ago, CheapEats’ lovely readers shared their top frugal cooking tips. Over the next few Fridays, we’re reprinting a selection of some of the most useful, starting today with advice on leftovers:
From Fiona:
Scoop leftover creamed potatoes onto a tray and open freeze, then pop into a freezer bag. You can always grab a [...]