Kevin May
- Jun 24, 2020
- 2 min read

Cooking with Scraps with Lindsay-Jean Hard - Ep 08

Updated: Dec 11, 2020

Turn your peels, cores, rinds, and stems into delicious meals.

Episode 08 Summary

How often do you throw away the peel of a pineapple, yet there is still lots of fruit and flavor left in it? What about broccoli stems, or apple cores? In this episode we meet Lindsay-Jean Hard, author of the cookbook Cooking with Scraps. She shares new and creative ways to look at peels, cores, rinds and stems as underutilized ingredients rather than parts to be thrown out. Once you see the potential, you will no doubt have fun coming up with your own ideas that are healthy for us and good for our environment!

Notable Quotes

I recommend that people choose one ingredient, whatever it is that they tend to have at home and start there and get comfortable with it and then expand to start using other scraps.

I think a lot of us are lucky enough that we're in a position of privilege where a recipe tells us that we can cut off and discard a kale stem, and we're able to do that without thinking about it. So it's a retraining of our brain to get back to the point where we value the whole thing and don't automatically make those choices, and think about how we can be using those ingredients.

For the kids' classes that I've had, as soon as I say “why would we want to eat our scraps?” every time a kid has said, well, because of the environment and you don't want food scraps going into the landfill, and I'm like, okay great, they get it, we’re all set.

If there's something that's about to go bad, make sure that you're using it that night for dinner or figuring out if you need to roast something and then freeze it to maximize its life.

About our Guest

Lindsay-Jean Hard’s education at the University of Michigan and passion for sustainability went on to inform and inspire her in many ways: in her garden, artwork, home, community, and writing—like her cookbook, Cooking with Scraps. Today she works to build and connect new communities as a marketer at Zingerman’s Bakehouse in Ann Arbor, Michigan.