8 Creative Ways to Use Up Vegetables and Reduce Food Waste (With Recipe Ideas)

This website may earn commissions from purchases made through links in this post.

Don’t throw out those vegetables at the bottom of the crisper. Here are 8 ideas with recipes to use up vegetables and reduce food waste.

woman removing bell pepper from the fridge

While good menu planning can help you to reduce food waste, there can be lots of reasons why you may have more vegetables than you planned.

Maybe your plans changed or didn’t go as intended.

Or you might have bagged a great deal on some local, seasonal produce.

Maybe you have an abundance of produce from the garden, or your neighbour just dropped off a bag of zucchini.

Whatever the reason, there are plenty of ways to use up leftover vegetables you have on hand (even ones that are looking limp and not so appetising) so that you’re reducing food (and money) waste.

How to Use Up Veggies in the Fridge

Before we get into the ways we can use up recipes, we need to cover storage. One of the reasons veggies go bad before we use them is they aren’t stored correctly.

If you want more information on how to store vegetables, you can check out my vegetable storage guide, which comes with a free printable for easy reference.

Below are eight flexible and customisable ways to make the most of vegetables before they go to waste.

1. Use Leftover Vegetables in Vegetable Soup

You can make soup from just about anything, whether it’s a chunky soup like this winter vegetable soup or a pureed soup like potato and leek, celery soup, pumpkin soup, or carrot soup.

The trick to making a pureed soup with just about any vegetable is as follows:

  1. lightly sweat some aromatics like onion and garlic
  2. add your vegetables of choice along with some water or stock
  3. add some aromatics if you choose, like herbs or spices (optional)
  4. let simmer until the vegetables are soft
  5. puree with a blender or stick blender and season to taste.

You can also add some cream just before stirring. Or not. It’s up to you.

Soup can be frozen in batches for later, giving you easy and delicious lunches and dinners. Just leave out the cream if you intend to freeze your soup.

If you use your own stock (see below), your soup will be souper-cheap (see what I did there).

2. Put Leftover Veggies in Pasta Sauce

Similar to soup, pasta sauce is also a great way to use up (and hide, if necessary) vegetables.

You can cook them in some tomatoes and then puree them for a marinara-style sauce. Serve this over pasta or mix with mince for a hidden vegetable spaghetti bolognese.

Another option is to make a cheesy pasta sauce with steamed vegetables stirred through.

3. Vegetable Stock From Leftover Veg or Scraps

I generally use vegetable scraps for stock, but you can also use up your limp carrots, celery, wilted parsley and other vegetables to make vegetable stock.

Keep this stock in the freezer to have on hand whenever a recipe calls for stock. It’s inexpensive and healthy, and you’re using those limp vegetables rather than throwing them away.

Check out this post on how to make vegetable stock and what vegetables can go in it.

4. Shred Vegetables to Make Fritters

You can use almost any vegetable in fritters. They are quick and easy to make and tasty as well.

Grate or finely chop some vegetables, mix in egg, flavourings and flour to combine and then fry like pancakes.

This is my go-to vegetable fritter recipe.

5. You Can Add Just About Anything to Versatile Fritatta 

Frittata is another flexible dish.

I particularly like roasting a whole variety of vegetables and then making a roast vegetable frittata, but steamed or sautéed vegetables work just as well.

Read further‘Free-up-the-fridge’ frittata recipe

6. Stir Fries and Curries are Great for Using Leftover Veg

Anything can go in a stir fry, curry or casserole! Use up bits and bobs of vegetables rolling around the crisper by cooking them together and serve with a sauce, rice and maybe some meat.

Recipe Tin Eats has a great all-purpose stir fry sauce, to which you can add any protein and vegetables you like before serving on rice or with noodles.

My go-too curry is this mild, kid-friendly curry that you can find here:  ‘Clear-the-Crisper’ Kid-Friendly Curry. If you prefer a bit of heat, just add some chilli!

8. Blend Veg into Juices and Smoothies

Juicing vegetables or blending them into a smoothie is a great way to use extra vegetables and increase your vegetable intake.

There are a bazillion smoothie recipes on the internet, just google your vegetable and smoothie or juice for some recipe ideas. One of my favourite ways to use up spinach is in this tropical smoothie recipe.

7. Freeze Vegetables For Later

A glut of seasonal produce can be enjoyed cheaply throughout the year by freezing now to eat later.

Here’s a post on how to freeze zucchini; you can use the same technique to freeze any vegetable you would normally find in the freezer section at the supermarket.

Some veggies that don’t freeze well include potato, onion, cabbage, and any vegetable that you would eat fresh later in a salad, like lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumber.

8. Preserve Vegetables with Pickles and Chutneys

Finally, vegetables can also be pickled or made into chutneys, and this will extend their life. Ploughman’s pickle is one example that will use up a variety of odds and ends from the crisper.

If you use Lacto-fermentation techniques, for example, turning cabbage into sauerkraut, then you will also be getting beneficial bacteria essential for optimum gut health.

With illness and a busy month of stuff on for the kids, our meal plans have been thrown awry for weeks in a row. The other day I had a big cook-up of all the unused vegetables in the fridge to use up everything that got left behind.

I made:

This cleared out the crisper and gave us meals for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks.

When we throw vegetables in the bin, we’re throwing away our hard-earned money, not to mention wasting all the resources used in growing the vegetables and getting them from farm to plate. Even vegetables that look past their use-by date can be used in soups and sauces, where their limpness doesn’t matter.

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

3 Comments

  1. Great ideas! I find it’s so easy to waste food so I’ve started shopping with a weekly menu in mind. Unless it’s on the menu or on special and I know I can add it to a meal, I don’t buy it.
    The good thing with veggies is that they are so versatile and can be added to any meal throughout the day.
    Also, buying frozen veggies helps prevent wastage and they’re always on hand if you need to fix up a quick meal.

  2. AudraBlue says:

    As I don’t have a family to cook for, it’s easier for me to just buy fresh veggies every few days. That way I’m always eating fresh and there’s no waste. But if I find there’s more leftover veggies that I thought, I just make soup or a casserole and freeze it in portions. So, sometimes I don’t even need to shop every few days because of the frozen meals I’ve made. They’re also handy if I have unexpected guests for lunch. A yummy homemade chunky soup, some fresh bread and butter and I have a cheap filling meal for more than myself.

    1. Melissa Goodwin says:

      Great advice. Thank you. I love having frozen meals in the freezer! ?