This excellent book from Wakefield Press is all about how to buy, store and use up foods.

 

There's a lot written on this topic, much of it the same, slightly shrill and unhelpful material repeated over and over again.  In contrast Making A Meal Of It is full of useful information, ideas and recipes. Cadden and Willcox have done their research, tested out their ideas and come up with simple and effective ways to keep ingredients fresh, use up every bit and, most helpfully, how to restore and revive the ingredients you've forgotten about. The ideas and recipes are practical and flexible and I've learnt a lot from reading it. 

As another review notes, this could all be very serious and well, worthy, but

"the authors have managed to attack everything with a great sense of humour, to add interesting facts and figures when appropriate and still manage to come up with recipes and ideas that are intriguing, useful and, thankfully, anything but glam, all presented in a casual, conversational way."

I've used this book over and over and over again. Moving into a new house last year I was greeted by a tree over-flowing with limes. I checked the book and now have a freezer full of lime halves, ready for summer drinks. I've stopped freezing leftover bits and pieces of bread (which never get used) and started adding them to soups, where they thicken the mixture in a quite delicious way. Plus their chapter on eggs is brilliant for working out what to do with leftover yolks and whites.

Highly recommended.