You are welcome to anything you can find in the McComb bins

Jul 8 2008 By Richard McComb

In the new era of food frugality, I would like to invite any of you to nip round to my house tonight and help yourself to any edible treats you may find stashed in my rubbish bins.

There are a few smears of tuna mayonnaise, knocked up for sarnies on Saturday; there are three or four chunks of roasted sweet potato that we thought would work well with the kangaroo fillets later that evening (they didn’t – and neither did the Skippy steaks, which, in my defence, formed part of a work-related food tasting, and therefore I didn’t buy them, although I am culpable when it comes to the waste); the knob off the end of a Waitrose baguette (I can’t eat knobs, they scratch my upper palate); and, distressingly, a left-over portion of my wife’s terrific homemade shepherd’s pie, which I should have eaten, but forgot about, then remembered, re-heated for the kids, and forgot about again, because I also baked some jacket potatoes, and I’m a bloke, so I can’t deal with two potato-related products at the same time.

Safe to say then that it’s not entirely rich pickings, although for us it is an abundance. It does, however, demonstrate that Gordon Brown is right, sort of, when he claims the average family could save a few bob if it didn’t chuck away so much tucker.

The problem for me is that, this weekend’s Outback bush flesh excepted, the food waste from our household tends to be measured in pennies rather than pounds. So when Mr Brown and his Cabinet Office researchers claim I could save £8 a week – or £420 a year – by throwing away less food, it is something I have to take with a large pinch of salt.

My days of food waste profligacy are long gone, the McCombs’ personal credit crunch pre-dating the global one by a fashionable couple of years.

If my belt tightens any more, my eyes will pop out.

The good thing, though, about having an ever-dwindling budget for food is that you don’t have to menu-plan. Things just take care of themselves.

Sunday: Roast. Monday: Cold roast. Tuesday: Stew. Wednesday: Rissoles. Thursday: Gruel. Friday: Gruel du Jour (it’s the same as Thursday’s but the kids are fooled by the name and think they’re getting something different).

Jamie Oliver’s current promo for Sainsbury’s shows the brain dead how families can eat for a fiver. It really isn’t that difficult. First, don’t buy any of the crap ready-done meals produced for supermarkets, and that goes for the crappy cakes as well as the crappy curries and the crappy Chinese dinners.

Secondly, don’t buy any of the crappy economy meats sold by supermarkets (or, in fact, most meats sold by supermarkets). Instead, find a decent butcher.

Ethical considerations aside, economy meats, such as £1.99 chickens, induce weight-loss and a corresponding hunger for takeaway kebabs and cheese string.

This is because bargain poultry has a lower nutritional content than blowflies (and blowflies, as anyone who has walked in a cow field will know, live on poo poo).

Needless to say, canny PR companies working for the food industry are keeping their clients happy by coming up with celebrity cash-saving nosh tips.

Ocado, which is responsible for Waitrose home deliveries, has roped in culinary luminaries including TV presenters Sarah Greene and Ruth Langsford (anyone ever heard of her?)

Former Wimbledon champion Pat Cash suggests shoppers should “smooth it,” saying: “I make smoothies with fruit that is a little old. It tastes great and is very healthy.”

It all works fine, if you, like Pat, happen to have a stash of mildly decaying strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, mangos, kiwi fruit, kumquats and fairtrade guava.

However, given that the average household fruit bowl contains a bashed French gala apple, a half-opened black banana and the dates left over from Christmas, the notion of a home-made smoothie suddenly becomes less appealing.

Thankfully, Mr Brown won’t have to render down the pigs feet this week as he discusses the global food crisis at the G8 summit in Japan.

Katsuhiro Nakamura is prepping the eight official dinners for world leaders, and Mr Brown will be invited to try the Michelin-starred chef’s tangy G8 pâté.

It contains an evocative ingredient from each of the eight nations.

There are black truffles from France, ham from Italy, and crumbs from the UK.

The pâté, incidentally, is best spread thinly.