I cook to live, my husband lives to cook.

We share the cooking. On my days everybody knows what they’ll be getting as I have four signature dishes (by signature dish, I mean ‘thing I can cook without a recipe’). I’m no foodie, I like to get cooking out of the way as quickly as possible so I can get on with living.

My cooking habits are good in terms of waste prevention because I buy the same things every week and everything gets used up.

But my husband is a different animal. On his cooking days we never know what we’ll be getting because it seems to depend on what the food fairies whisper in his ear. I shop online because I hate supermarkets. If I ask him what he wants me to add to the online shop, he gets all stressy, saying ‘I can’t shop like that, I don’t know what I’ll feel like cooking!’ (No, I’m not married to Gordon Ramsay).

So I leave him to do his own shopping in person in the actual supermarket. He likes to see, touch and smell food; it inspires him. I think there must be some French strain somewhere in the Birmingham/Dundee DNA mash-up of his family.

This dual shopping routine is far from ideal, since it means he might buy things I’ve already bought. It’s why we ended up recently with three full jars of ground ginger. Not the end of the world, of course, since it stores well and we like ginger biscuits, but that’s the only over-consumption I’m admitting to since I’d be too ashamed to tell you the whole truth.

Obviously, we compost unavoidable food waste in our Green Johanna, but composting should ideally be the final stage in the food waste hierarchy after meal planning and food storage. The environmental cost involved in the production and transporting of food is so high that prevention is better than composting.

We know we should plan meals in advance based on knowing what we already have. We know that, and yet sometimes the pace of modern life means we fall short. Stuff happens. We forget our list. We stress shop. Our husband fails to check the ground ginger situation.

So, when I read about the Kitche free mobile app I was immediately interested.

Kitche’s premise is that fighting food waste starts at home by buying what you eat and eating what you buy.  If we did this, we would help prevent the staggering 4.5 million tonnes of food waste created in the UK each year – enough to fill eight Wembley stadiums.

It goes without saying that by doing this you will save yourself a chunk of money without even depriving yourself of anything. The average family in the UK throws food worth £730 in the bin every year. When it comes to tightening the belt on household expenditure, such unnecessary waste is low-hanging fruit.

The app enables you to scan food products from major supermarkets receipts with a snap of your camera so you can keep track of food you’ve got at home, even when you’re on the move. In this way you stop robotic consumption and shop smartly, not blindly.

10 easy tips to cut food waste

These tips taken from Nancy Birtwhistle’s best-selling book Green Living Made Easy are easy to incorporate into your everyday routine.

1. Thyme to save herbs

To double the life of shop-bought fresh herbs: dampen a double-thickness sheet of kitchen paper with cold water. Lay on it either parsley, coriander, dill, thyme, rosemary or mint after removing from the packet. Roll loosely so that all the sprigs are surrounded by a cold, damp blanket, then pop in an airtight box and keep in the fridge.

• 2. Freeze cheese please

To avoid cheese becoming hard and dry: buy a large slab of cheese – cut the block into 100g pieces. Put one block back in the original pack to use this week, then put the remaining pieces in a container in the freezer. Then for the next few weeks you have cheese that can be grated or used once thawed in the fridge for an hour or so.

• 3. Take stock of veggies

The best way to accumulate sufficient veggie bits for a stock is to keep a large plastic box or bag in the freezer and pop into it the ends of celery, parsley stalks, trimmings from onions, carrots, parsnips, pea pods, leeks and any other tasty veg. Once you have a large box or bagful, place in a large pan and simmer for half an hour or in a slow cooker for several hours. Strain, keep in the fridge for five days or freeze to be used later as a base for casseroles, soups, pie fillings and stews.

• 4. Piece of cake

Use a roll of reusable baking parchment instead of new greaseproof paper every time you bake. Use the bases of your favourite cake tins as a template, then cut the reusable parchment to size. Wash between uses.

• 5. Bag-tastic

 The plastic liners in cereal boxes can be used to separate almost anything and make a good alternative to cling film. If you unpeel the seams of the bag this can then be used for pastry rolling. They also make good bread bags and freezer bags, sandwich wraps and for using in lunch boxes and picnics.

• 6. Don’t shell out on eggs

Many baking recipes call for only egg yolk or egg whites, leaving leftovers of both. Egg whites freeze beautifully (for up to a year) and thaw in a bowl at room temperature in an hour or so.

Egg yolks can be frozen but need a light sprinkle of salt or sugar to prevent them going rubbery. Nancy rarely freezes yolks, instead making a quick lemon curd using the yolks, sugar, butter, lemon juice and zest. Stir on a low heat for several minutes until the mix slowly thickens. Store in a clean jar in the fridge.

• 7. Scrap happy

Packs of bacon can lead to waste if a couple of rashers are left in the packet to dry up and go off before you know it. Instead, keep a small box of cooked scraps in the freezer. Cook the random rashes until crispy. Break them up into small pieces and pop them in a box to save in the freezer. Use these scraps as a pizza topping, stirred into pasta or sprinkled over salads.

• 8. Spice of life

Nancy buys ginger or lemongrass only once or twice a year, keeping them in a plastic box in the freezer. She breaks ginger root into chunks and grates both the skin and flesh from frozen, then puts the unused root back into the box for next time.

She also freezes chillies and uses them from frozen. With lemongrass – trim the root ends and leaves, then freeze and slice from frozen to use.

• 9. The besto pesto

Did you know that nettles have more vitamins and nutrients than many other green veggies? The sting is destroyed by blanching. Wear rubber gloves to handle them. Bring a pan of water to the boil, then add the leaves. Have a bowl of cold water at the ready. Blanch the leaves in boiling water for 30 seconds then use tongs to remove them and plunge into cold water to halt the cooking process. Drain the leaves, dry on a clean cotton towel and squeeze as much water out as you can. Whizz in a blender with parmesan, garlic, nuts, lemon juice, salt, pepper, olive oil. Freeze in an ice cube tray.

It’s a good idea to also freeze leftover shop-bought pesto in an ice cube tray, since it needs to be used within five days of opening.

• 10. Chit chat

Save egg boxes for potato chitting (encouraging them to sprout). The cardboard moulds keep potatoes upright, the soft material doesn’t damage the shoots and the open design offers plenty of light.

Julie