Prepare Food

Check out our handy food tips to help you prepare meals, snacks and leftovers to help reduce your food waste.

Prepare Only What You Need

Create a meal plan! Get the household involved or be the boss of your own menu, then keep your plan somewhere you can see it. This meal plan template(PDF, 3MB) will help keep you on track.

Tips

• Plan weekly meals using a meal plan.
• Shop with a shopping list.
• Think carefully about the quantities needed to prepare the meal.
• Check what’s in the fridge, freezer and pantry before food shopping.
• Check who is eating before preparing food.
• Encourage small servings to reduce food waste.

Check out the Love Food Hate Waste online portion planner so you know how much to buy for your meals.

Leftovers

Create a shelf in your fridge or pantry for your leftovers or other food that needs to be eaten. Get everyone in the household to use food on this shelf first or rotate food by moving the oldest items to the front. Make it failproof by using transparent containers to easily see what’s inside.

Tips

• Make it easy to find food that needs to be used up.
• Eat the oldest items first.
• Freeze excess food.
• Cook one meal each week that combines foods that need to be used up.
• Use your leftovers as a tasty lunch.
• Preserve any unused vegetables by pickling or preserving food.

Check out these websites for easy ways to use up your leftovers:

OzHarvest - Use It Up recipes

Get creative in the kitchen and be inspired with OzHarvest's Use It Up recipes.

Love Food Hate Waste

Love Food Hate Waste International has an excellent database of recipes where you can search by ingredient to find ideas.

Recipes that use it up!

If you would like your recipes to have more of an Australian twist, check out these resources provided by the New South Wales Environment Protection Authority.