WASTING FOOD IS APPALLING

It's Christmas month and I am glad because it marks a whole month of sharing! I'm baking lots of goodies for friends, students and family and rolling a grand total of 158 chocolate peanut butter balls as edible gifts to whomever has a humongous sweet tooth.

All that being said, I'm glad that October and November are finally behind me because every cooking tour I did those two months with my guests subjected me to seeing all that lovely tangerine flesh being thrown away by the crates by so many fruit vendors because they only want to keep the skin for sun-drying. Albeit this fresh dark green turned brown coloured peel has a number of medicinal value, adds a distinct flavour to certain Chinese sweet soup desserts and does add quite a nice flavour to steamed pork and seafood not to mention how it can work wonders as a throat lozenge, can't the flesh be creatively used in ways other than being dumped into our landfills? I thought they are nearly at full capacity and we're supposedly trying desperately to educate our children to reduce waste and save food? What hypocrites!

I did my share of collecting a quite a few unwanted bags of the fruit from a nice fruit vendor by the name of LEE and juiced them until my fingers blistered. All the while, I was thinking how many tangerines were thrown away annually in Hong Kong. I have some consolation that now I have nearly a whole year to ponder how I can incorporate these lovely, unwanted fruit into my cooking classes and tours come next year.

In the meantime, buy only what you need, be creative with your ingredients and stop wasting food. Merry Christmas, ALL!