40 Kitchen Scraps You Should Never Throw Away – And The Genius Ways To Reuse Them

You’ve spent the last 20 minutes chopping up every last ingredient to make your dinner. That explains the pile of peelings and other assorted food waste that sits atop your cutting board. Now, your instinct might be to throw all of them into the garbage – but we say, not so fast. There are so many genius ways to reuse your leftover bits of food. Your spoils can clean tarnished silver, feed your precious pets and even make it so that you never have to buy salad greens again. So, before you trash your scraps, make sure they’re not one of these 40 super-handy items that you can re-use...

40. Soured yogurt can taste delicious

If you’ve got out-of-date all-natural yogurt, you’re actually in luck. The sugar- and additive-free varieties of yogurt will start to sour, but they offer you a strong, tangy flavor that you can fold into cake batters or whip into salad dressings. And there’s no harm in eating it sour, either: in fact, you still get all of the probiotic benefits that come with eating unexpired pots of yogurt.

39. Shove scraps in the freezer

If you can’t use your veggie scraps right away, throw them into a bag and pop that into the freezer. That way, you can pull it out and add veggie bits to your stocks and broths whenever you want. On that note, you can start a second bag full of leftover herb leaves and stems. You can add them to soups, too. Or, you can blitz these unneeded bits into pestos, sauces and spreads while they’re still fresh – it’s up to you.

38.Old garlic, new garlic

Let’s say you’ve cracked into a garlic bulb and you’ve used all but one or two of the cloves. You can use the remaining pods as seeds to grow a new garlic plant! Just sow the cloves with their roots facing down, making sure they’ll get plenty of sunlight. In a few days, you should see a green stem poking through the soil – and, eventually, that’ll be a new garlic plant. 

37. Sugar up your unruly hair

Your hair’s a mess, so you throw open the medicine cabinet in search of your gel but, unfortunately, the bottle’s empty. Thankfully, if you have a teeny bit of leftover sugar in your pantry, you’re not entirely out of luck. Dissolve a teaspoon of the sweet stuff into a cup of warm water, and you’ve got the perfect alternative. This home-made solution is particularly handy for spiked-up looks.