Waste Not

See this? This bin.

This is a food waste recycling bin. There is a little bin to hang around inside your kitchen, and a bigger bin to leave outside. You decant your little bin into your big bin and the bin men take it away once a week.

The idea is that because householders will now be able to put their food waste in a separate bin to be collected once a week, the usual grey bin collection can change from once a week to once a fortnight.

Well, that's no good is it???????

Not for people like us who already compost all our food waste and recycle like mad things, and have been doing so since we got an allotment 4 years ago. All this bin means is that 1) we've had our weekly collection cut to fortnightly with no benefit to ourselves because food recycling will make no difference to what we have to chuck out because we can't recycle it and 2) there's another bit of tat to clutter up the kitchen/ garden/ driveway. It isn't even half the size of the grey bin, so Lord knows how people are going to manage when they start using it.

And I'm just waiting for the day when I go to put some rubbish in the grey bin and find some git has filled it with their rubbish because they don't have space in their own grey bin because it's only collected once a fortnight now. There are several families in our street with several children who overfill their bins every week let alone every fortnight.

Ah well. I suppose the council meant well (HA!). I expect someone, somewhere deep in the bowels of County Hall thought this would be a good idea.

And if I find myself in excess of non-recyclable rubbish once a fortnight, I can always get in my little car and drive to the local tip. Or to County Hall to put in in their bins.

Because that would be environmentally friendly, wouldn't it?

On a less whingy-pants note, I am considering the purchase of a pressure cooker. My reticence is guided by the fact my Gran had a pressure cooker which used to scare the beejeezus out of me when I was a child. I was convinced, mainly because of the loud whistling and screeching noises it emitted, that it would blow up at any second, scattering scalding hot beetroot/ potatoes/ swede across Gran's kitchen and into my face. The lid would rocket like a jet-propelled, er...rocket...into the ceiling, leaving a massive hole which I would then show to my own children as a chill warning NEVER to buy a pressure cooker, because of the structural damage they could inflict on a house.

I never mentioned this fear to Gran because she was a pragmatic, no nonsense woman who, in order to get this silly notion out of my head, would have put me in charge of mass producing boiled beetroot in the damn thing.

But now, as I'm starting to cook more with beans and pulses, (Andy and Heather are THRILLED at this development in my vegetarian culinary repertoire) I am thinking a pressure cooker would be a good idea, because it cooks beans and pulses more quickly than normal boiling.

I've done a bit of research on the interwebbly vis a vis different pressure cookers, all of which mention poundage per square litre type jargon, which in turn makes me think of tyre pressures, which in turn brings me back to fear of sudden explosion.

Do I get a tinky wee cheap one, just to try and see if my nerves can cope? Do I go for it big time and get a super duper enormous Tardis one with a life time guarantee that can cook a whole squash in 3 minutes flat?

Or do I put a hefty brick on the lid of one of my normal saucepans and whistle a tuneless tune?