Picnic Planning

Picnics are an ideal way to spend long, hot summer afternoons. Sandwiches with tasty fillings, quiches and cold meats make eating outside with your friends and family a pleasurable, gastronomic delight.

 

These handy hints from Love Food Hate Waste will ensure your picnics are perfect.

Picnic Family
  • Use a cool box or cool bag to help keep food fresh and tasty.
  • Leftover potatoes make a tasty potato salad when tossed with sliced red or spring onions and mayonnaise.
  • Leftover cold roast meats are delicious with pickle or chutney.
  • If you froze those leftover cooked sausages and cold cuts from your BBQ, use them in your next picnic.  Take them out of the freezer and put them in the fridge the night before and take them in your cool bag.
  • Why not chop up some spare veg from your salad drawer into little crudités for dunking into hummus or your favourite dip?
  • Quiches make perfect picnic food and can help use up eggs and cream. Add flaked cooked fish or fry that last rasher of bacon and some onion for classic quiche Lorraine.
  • Take a look in your fridge before planning picnic sandwiches, combine your leftovers for some interesting fillings.
  • A great way to use up fruit is to take it on picnics as they need little preparation and are easy to transport. Alternatively, chop them up and take in an airtight box as a fruit salad, or set some chunks into mini jellies.
  • Over-ripe fruit can be blitzed into healthy fruit smoothies. Add a ripe banana to make it extra think.
  • If salad is looking tired and wilted, put it in a bowl of water with a couple of ice-cubes and it will become nice and crisp again.
  • A dollop or two of coleslaw and hummus make delicious additions to salads. Make your own coleslaw to use up your veg by combining grated carrot with shredded cabbage and some mayonnaise.
  • Use up cheese by grating and adding to a salad. Store cheese in its wrapping in an airtight container in the fridge or grate and freeze for sprinkling over pizza's and pasta.
  • Why not peel, core and slice any apples that look tired and have with some salad leaves, a wedge of cheese, some slices of ham and a spoonful of pickle?