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Love your daily dose of fruit and vegetables?
Including fruit and veggies in your diet each day means you will end up with quite the pile of rinds and scraps.
Before you throw those in your compost pile or trash can, why not get a little extra use out of them?
Jeff Yeager, author of The Cheapskate Next Door — a man who obviously likes to make the most out of what he buys — came up with a few ideas for just that.
He says “a rind is a terrible thing to waste” and therefore came up with some cool and unique ideas for getting that extra use out of your fruit and veggie rinds.
Here they are:
#1 – Infused Olive Oil – Add any citrus peels to your EVOO, extra virgin olive oil, to give it that extra flav a flave.
#2 – Jam – For all of you who be jammin, making jam of course, add the rinds from lemons, oranges, etc to make an easy marmalade.
#3 – Foot Rub – Use papaya skins, as well as pulp, to rub on the bottoms of your feet. Papaya are full of vitamin A and papain which helps break down inactive proteins and remove all of those dead skin cells. Plus, it’ll make your feet smell quite fruity.
#4 – Hair Dye – Bring potato peels to a boil for about 30 minutes and then strain out the peels. Using this water to rinse your hair after shampooing will gradually and naturally darken your hair.
#5 – Polishing Metal – Citrus rinds, such as lime and lemon, are full of citric acid which makes a great polisher. To speed up the process a bit, try sprinkling a little baking soda or even using a little ketchup.
#6 – Houseplant Shine – Rub a banana peel against the leaves of the plants in your house and it will result in a b-e-a-utiful shine. Banana peels can also act as a natural fertilizer.
#7 – Chicken Tastiness – Stuff a chicken, preferably free-range, with a mixture of rinds and scraps from all your fruit and veggies to give it extra flavor. As an added bonus, the baking of these scraps actually helps them break down faster in the compost pile.
While throwing the veggie and fruit scraps in a compost pile is preferable, it’s sometimes not practical without buying an in-house composter (which can be expensive).
So wherever you end up throwing the rinds, why not get a little extra use out of them before discarding?
Have you used any of the methods described above before? If so, how did they work for you? Are there any other uses that you know of for fruit and veggie scraps?
Photo: lauramtportugal
I’m an outdoorsy and recently graduated from college yogi. In the past few years I’ve learned lots of simple steps to becoming greener and have found living green to not only be rewarding, but easy. I hope to pass on some of these simple ideas to you too!
