Waste not - want not

I was bought up to be thrifty and not to waste anything that had any 'life, use or wear' left in it and my Mum and Dad also taught me how to 'make do and mend'. Because I had two brothers and two sisters, money was tight in our household and we all accepted that we couldn't have the material things that other kids had. This didn't bother any of us as we had the most important gifts of all, we were loved and we all had each other. Perhaps this sounds corny to today's youngsters but that was how it was and I don't think any of us would have changed a thing.
My Dad used to grow most of the vegetables that we ate and Mum kept hens for eggs. All the vegetable peelings were cooked up and mixed with mash for the chickens (it had quite a pong but they loved it) and they also had the cabbage stalks hung up in their run so that they could pick over those too. If there was anything that could not be cooked up for the birds it was put on the compost heap and recycled. Dad used to garden organically and that was more that fifty years ago so I do the same now.
No food was wasted in our house and Mum was a good cook so every meal time we all sat at the table and cleared our plates. We rarely had 'leftovers' and if we did, she was very good at stretching them and making them into a totally different dish for the next meal. Mum would have been horrified at the food that is wasted today and in many ways, the lessons I learned from her have stood me in good stead.
That is why I have a lot of strange things in small bags in my freezer, a luxury my Mum never had as we didn't even own a fridge in those days. Because I live alone the freezer is my best friend. I cannot bear to throw away things like the odd chillie, or two inch piece of ginger or even the half bunch of chopped herbs so I freeze them in little containers or bags and use them up another day. When I make soups and casseroles I have always got a 'little something' in the freezer that I can use up so I saved the bottom of the asparagus spears that we had last week and I never, ever strain vegetables out of soup as some chefs do, everything gets blitzed in the blender and eaten. I don't do clear consommes or thin soups!