High-country cuisine: ‘TUCK INTO MY SCRUMMY SCRAPS!'

SARAH’S MADE THE KITCHEN HER HAPPY PLACE, USING FOOD THAT NORMALLY GOES TO WASTE

- Fleur Guthrie

When Sarah Burtscher used to live on a remote high country station in Tekapo, with a four-hour round trip to a large supermarket, she got used to making do with what she had, when need be.

Enjoying cooking for her family, the mum-of-three learnt ingenious ways to avoid food wastage and began to term certain dishes as “fridge cleaner” recipes – turning older, forgotten ingredients lurking at the back of the fridge or pantry into tasty meals and snacks.

“With remote living, you are totally responsible for all your own rubbish,” Sarah tells the Weekly from the family’s new base in Christchurch.

“With no easy wheelie bins to take it away, it makes you aware. I looked at what I was doing in cleaning out the fridge and wondered what the stats were on wastage from the kitchen. The more I looked into it, the more I realised our food waste statistics are horrific.

“Kiwis throw away 157,389 tonnes of food a year and a lot of people just don’t know how to utilise their grocery shop to the full.”