Food safety warning: bacteria, specifically Bacillus cereus, loves cooked rice – and it can quickly grow to dangerous levels. Minimise it’s growth by cooling it quickly, put it in the fridge as soon as possible then use it with a day or so.

1. Rice pudding

Rice pudding is eaten all over the world in one form or another. The general principle is the same – cook the rice in milk then when it’s tender, add a sweetener (sugar, honey or fruit syrup) and something to give it a bit more flavour such as cream, egg yolk, fruit or nuts and spices such nutmeg & cinnamon. There are thousands of different ways to make it – experiment to find your favourite!

Leftover cooked rice can be used in place of dry rice – particularly if you’re happy to have a mushier pudding in the end. When making it fresh, most people use short grain rice but anything will do – white or brown, long or short, basmati, jasmine – whatever you’ve got on the go.

One of my favourite rice pudding recipes is with coconut and mango – yum!

2. Add it to soup

Leftover rice – again, any time – is great as a bulking agent in soup. Added early on, it breaks down and makes the whole soup thicker; added towards the end, it provides scoopable particles to chase around the bowl.

Add it to a hearty minestrone, or a tasty Moroccan veg soup – or add it to a simple chicken soup for those days when your belly needs something nice and bland.

3. Stuffed peppers (or marrow)

You can quickly make a tasty dinner by stuffing bell pepper or marrow rings with leftover rice.

Cut the top off the bell pepper and remove any seeds/white bits, then mix the rice with any meat, veggies or herbs you fancy, top with a bit of cheese and bake in a medium oven for about half an hour.

As with rice pudding, everyone has their own way of making them with their own favourite ingredients. Some great examples to get you started: beans and rice stuffed peppers; courgette, basil and rice ones; and super saucy tomato and beef mince ones.

To be extra frugal, use whatever meat or veggies you’ve got leftover alongside the rice – a little chilli con carne or casserole is perfect to stir in and lightly flavour the rice.

4. Bake it into bread – or muffins

Have you ever tried rice bread? Not rice cakes, those boring puffy white things but actual proper bread? If not, you should – it’s great and since you need to cook the rice down into a mush, starting with leftover cooked rice will save you time as well as preventing waste.

Check out this video how-to to see how it’s done.

Alternately, fancy something sweeter? Then I give you vanilla rice muffins.

5. Fried rice

Finally, no “uses for leftover rice” list would be complete without fried rice. Fried rice is best made with cooked rice left to go cold so it’s perfect for using up leftovers.

Again, there are a billion varieties and flavours. A simple recipe makes a good side dish but a couple more ingredients – some meat, fish, tofu or exciting veg – and you’ve got yourself a tasty main meal. Try this flavourful chicken and prawns recipe.

What’s your favourite thing to do with leftover rice?

ANYWAY, waxed paper bread packaging. We’ve had bread bags and the film stuff from fancy fresh supermarket baked bread but not the waxed paper option. It’s not as common as it used to be but some brands still use it across the board.

The wrapping is not currently recyclable but carefully opened, it can be opened out into a decent size wipeable sheet. It can then be reused for it’s original purpose again and again – wrapping around homemade bread or sandwiches – but has anyone done anything more involved with it?

From a reduce point of view, you could make you own packaging-free bread or source packaging-free bread from a local baker/independent store. If you have to rely on supermarket but also have decent plastic recycling facilities in your area, you might prefer to buy bread in easy-to-recycle plastic bags – that seems to call back to our discussion the other week, about whether or not you choose to buy things with more packaging or in this case packaging which on the face of it seems worse for the environment (paper versus plastic) but is actually easier to recycle.

It’s about how to reduce food waste and having to rely on supermarket supplies by getting the most out of each home baking session – how to make baked goods that’ll last.

Do you have any tricks to stop bread, biscuits, cakes etc from quickly going stale?

Do you freeze dough or part-baked/fully baked items? Any tricks or tips?

Any special ingredients to include or avoid to make things last that little bit longer?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

I know about making breadcrumbs with stale bread but is there anything that can be done with bread that’s gone a bit mouldy? I don’t mean eat it of course but compost it?

Obviously the best thing to do is avoid it going mouldy in the first place – freeze it if you don’t have time to use it up or turn it into breadcrumbs there and then. But sometimes loaves have a tendency to turn in a blink of an eye so it’s harder to avoid.

Bread is one of those things that some people compost and others don’t. It will break down quite quickly but in an open, slow going compost heap, it might attract vermin to the pile even quicker. It’s also not going to add that much goodness to the heap either so you might decide it’s not worth the risk. But then what do you do with it instead?

Any suggestions? Do you compost bread?

(Photo of non-moldy bread because looking for a photo of moldy bread was making me too queasy!)

The recipe needs the oven to be hot (230C/450F/Gas mark 8) and in addition to the 40-50 minute cooking time, it needs to be well pre-heated (the cast iron casserole dish needs to be sizzling or the bread will stick) – so a lot of heat for a long time. We don’t generally eat enough bread to warrant making multiple loaves at once so I try to use the other space for other things. I’ve made scones/biscuits a few times and we nearly always have egg shells that need baking before crushing & returning to the chickens as grit.

Any other suggestions for things I could cook/bake alongside the bread? It’s not a huge oven and the casserole for the bread takes up quite a bit of space but there is a spare rack for things no more than 6cm/3″ high, a narrow strip next to the casserole, and the oven floor too.

(We usually bake mid-morning so we have cooled fresh bread for sandwiches at lunchtime. Since I’m usually working then, I don’t have a lot of time to make things from scratch and also it’s not a suitable time to make things that need to be eaten immediately after cooking. The oven is too hot for slow-cooking anything for lunch/dinner. Any suggestions would be welcome but suggestions taking these points into account would be especially great!)

Hi. I saw everyone’s great ideas about bread bags the other week but we don’t get sliced bread, we get baguettes and the stuff baked in the shop which come in film rather than plastic bread bags. Can that be recycled too?

Ooh, good question. I’m not 100% sure what type of plastic that is – I’ve sent emails to a couple of supermarkets to see if they know so can advise further. It’s maybe cellophane – and if it is, it’s biodegradable. Anyone know?

As for reuses though, it’s not as smooth and, for what of a better word, floppy as the LDPE/number 4 plastic used for pre-packed bread – but because of that, it would be better to use as a lightweight packaging material (it would scrunch, not crush flat). It’s not as pretty as the plastic wrap used on bouquets but there might be some overlap in the reuses.

Any other suggestions?

Most pre-wrapped loaves (in the UK at least) come in LDPE bags – low-density polyethylene, ie, plastic number 4. They can be doorstep recycled in some places (check your local guidelines) and can be included with carrier bags at some collection spots.

But how can they be reused first? The most simple reuse is, of course, as a sandwich bag – but anything more interesting or creative?

(Photo by Richard George)

hi, i was wondering if anybody knew what to do with bread tags. i hate throwing them away, but i don’t know what else to do with them. would welcome any suggestions.

We don’t really have them over here these days – shops seem to prefer those little sticky things that lose their stickiness (and therefore ability to seal the bag) after one opening but then still manage to attach themselves to your shoes/socks/cat and refuse to come off no matter how much you shake your foot/cat.

Anyway… bread tags/clips. I suspect they could just be reused as general plastic bag seals around the kitchen – but any other suggestions?

(Photo by Bando26)

But what, oh what, can I do with it?

I suspect throwing it all out to the birds would a) be overkill since they can’t eat that much and b) literally overkill, because of the cats (or at least overpounce-and-miss because our cats are tubby and generally inept when it comes to that sort of thing) but it seems such a waste to just throw it in the bin.

Any suggestions?

Oh, we had such good intentions. We made bread at least twice a week and made pizza dough too. We made quick white bread and long slow wholemeal. We used the timer so we’d wake up to nice fresh bread in the morning. Ah, happy days.

Then after about a six weeks, like I guess about 95% of people that own a breadmaker, the novelty wore off and suddenly we just had an unused appliance taking up half the worktop and a couple of big bags of buy-one-get-one-never-use flour in the cupboard.

Time passed.

Then, recently, I found I had a bit more time on my hands and I decided to make a pizza base-esque garlic bread. I turned to our good old flour mountain with glee. Our now out of date flour mountain. Our now out of date with ick, some tiny crawling things in it. The glee wore off and I learnt a good lesson about buy-one-get-one-free products and novelty devices.

I’m not obsessive about best-before dates but I draw the line at cooking with tiny crawling things. So what non-culinary uses are there for old flour?

(Photo by melaniemar, c/o www.sxc.hu)