Birdwatchers Show How To Turn Overripe Food Waste Into Sushi For Winged Visitors
Don’t know what to do with bananas too ripe to make banana bread? Consider feeding your guests—and by guests, we mean the ones who chirp and help pollinate the flowers in your garden.
Ocado, a grocery e-retailer from the UK, has teamed up with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and public relations firm MHP Mischief to help turn food scraps you likely won’t use up into “treats for tweets.” With recipes for bird-friendly cakes and sushi, you’ll have leftovers literally flying off your fridge in no time.
The miniature meals, crafted in time for the 44th annual Big Garden Birdwatch this week, are designed to keep birds in the UK warm and fed through the winter. Each recipe is rich in ingredients to sustain them during cold weather, including suet and lard, which enrich winged friends with energy.
They also give new purpose to leftovers revealed by climate action group WRAP to most likely be discarded by households, like cheese, fruit, and vegetables. In other words, one man’s trash is another bird’s fodder.
Traditional bird feed ingredients like dried mealworms and nyjer seeds might be hard for humans to consume, but they are easy for swallows to swallow and provide avians with the nutrition they need. For example, the Wagtails’ Winter Stew is made up of lard, cornmeal, dried fruit, seeds, cooked vegetable scraps, and mealworms.
For chirpy friends with a sweet tooth, there’s a Blackbird Berry Cheesecake consisting of stale cookie or cake crumbs, lard, mild cheese, raisins or currents, apples, and seeds.
The Seedy Sushi for cultured guests contains salt-free cooked rice, lard, carrots, green vegetable scraps, and bird seed.
Other food ideas include Robin Raisin Ice Cream and Fruity Finch Tart. Full recipes can be found here.
Best of all, each dish requires no cooking (except for melting lard or suet), so you can do as the birds do and just wing it.
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[via Ocado, Retail Times, Daily Mail, MHP / LinkedIn, images via Ocado]
