Tasty WasteNOTS is a lovely, modern cookbook that shows you how to use cook smartly and waste nothing. In this way you improve your cooking skills, limit your expenses and help save the planet.

With healthy and wholesome recipes for breakfast, starters, soups and salads, main dishes, snacks and smoothies, pastes, pestos and dips, desserts and even the braai. With added little-known nutritional facts, wine suggestions, know-how to start a vegetable garden and diet suggestions for our furry friends. By a best-selling respected nutritionist and chef.

Sally-Ann Creed is a Functional Integrative Nutritional Therapist, product developer, speaker, author and the co-author of the bestselling The Real Meal Revolution. Jason is currently a chef, presenter and consultant in the restaurant industry, after a short stint in marketing and the film industry.

Here are two select recipes from the book get you inspired. Be sue to enter the competition below to win yourself a copy.

Breakfast Cake
Serves 1 hungry person or 2 peckish people. Essentially, this breakfast cake is made of blueberry pancakes. I have never been a fan of overly sweet breakfasts, or overly sweet anything really, but this I could eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner!

Ingredients
1 ripe banana
60 ml (¼ cup) full-fat cream cheese
4 extra-large eggs
5 ml (1 tsp) honey
1 ml (¼ tsp) ground cinnamon
Unsalted butter for frying
250 ml (1 cup) blueberries
20–30 ml (4–6 tsp) mascarpone cheese
Enough honey to drizzle

Pop the banana, cream cheese, eggs, honey and cinnamon into a blender and blend until smooth. Melt about 2,5 ml (½ tsp) of butter in a small non-stick pan, then pour in about 80 ml (1/3 cup) of the pancake mixture. As soon as it starts to bubble around the edges, add a couple of blueberries. Once the middle stops wobbling, you can carefully turn over the pancake and fry for another couple of seconds. After removing each pancake from the pan, lightly spread it with a little mascarpone, then repeat with the rest of your batter until it is all used up. Drizzle the stack with some honey, cut into ‘cake slices’ and serve.

Nutritional facts
The mixture of banana, pancakes, mascarpone and berries – could there be a more heavenly breakfast? I seriously doubt it. Apart from the tantalising thought of what this will taste like, there are nutritional benefits to be gleaned from such a delicious start to the day.

Bananas are a bit higher in carbs than many other fruits (23 g carbs and 3 g fibre giving you 20 g net carbs to be exact), but they pack such a powerful nutritional punch that excluding them is simply not an option. Bananas also have many health benefits.

They are: High in potassium to help lower blood pressure. Very high in vitamin B6, which assists brain function, normal nerve functioning, red blood cell formation and protein digestion.
A good source of vitamin C – humans can’t produce this (neither can guinea pigs, but that’s another book), so we need to eat foods rich in this vitamin daily. A great source of soluble fibre. Packed with antioxidants (catechins, flavonoids, and so on) to prevent premature ageing and to protect against heart disease.

Hands up who’s had heartburn after a meal? Why not try a banana instead of an unpalatable fizzing pill in water – they are an effective (if rather indulgent) alternative to anti-heartburn medication. They even help prevent stomach ulcers.

And if you eat them green, your gut bacteria will have them for dinner! Green bananas contain plenty of resistant starch and fibre, which is fermented into butyrate in the large intestine to feed the healthy bacteria (this kind of starch dissipates with ripening and is converted to sugars, hence eating them green). The resistant starch and fibre is not absorbed by you but is enjoyed by your ‘intestinal residents’ instead, and they thank you for this by strengthening your immunity and making you feel good.

Hangover Eggs
Serves 4. As much as we try to be angels and saints, the occasional night out with family and friends is totally acceptable, and sometimes even necessary. Here is a very tasty and super healthy breakfast to get you back on the mend, using milk thistle to help repair the liver. Milk thistle cannot be absorbed without fat, so eggs are the perfect vessel. And the turmeric will help ease any aches and pains caused by too much dancing.

Ingredients
2,5 ml (½ tsp) grated fresh ginger
2,5 ml (½ tsp) freshly grated garlic
15 ml (1 Tbsp) coconut oil
6 extra-large eggs
125 ml (½ cup) fresh cream
5 ml (1 tsp) organic turmeric
5 ml (1 tsp) finely ground milk thistle seeds
2,5 ml (½ tsp) Himalayan salt
1 ml (¼ tsp) cayenne pepper
1 tomato, chopped
3 spring onions, finely sliced

Start off by gently frying the ginger and garlic in the coconut oil for a few seconds while you beat together the eggs, cream, turmeric, milk thistle, salt and pepper. Add the egg mixture to the pan and cook for about 2 minutes – (there’s nothing worse than overcooked scrambled eggs). Top with chopped tomato and spring onion and you are ready to start your day. Your liver thanks you in advance. Don’t forget to keep the eggshells.

Nutritional info
A 1960s advert on British television used to say you could ‘go to work on an egg’ and showed a man driving a huge egg to work. Funny, but accurate nutritionally speaking, as eggs contain every single nutrient we need other than vitamin C, which makes them one of the most complete foods on the planet. As for cholesterol being raised and eggs being a threat to the heart – pffft. This has been debunked now by dozens of papers and trials. So forget the scaremongers and start eating eggs again – often! And don’t just eat the white, eat the whole egg.

Like carrots and liver, eggs are great food for the eyes as they are rich in carotenoids, specifically lutein and zeaxanthin. There is so much to say about eggs, but here are a few really great things to consider next time you eat one:

According to a study, an egg a day is excellent for overall eye health and could even prevent macular degeneration. The carotenoids present in eggs help to prevent cataracts. There are 6–7 grams of very high quality protein in an egg, which means it has all nine of the essential amino acids. This makes it a ‘complete’ protein, which is not found anywhere in the plant kingdom.

Eggs are extremely heart healthy – they are said to prevent strokes and heart attacks, and do not have a negative effect on cholesterol. In fact, studies show that two eggs a day will improve your cholesterol profile! Each egg yolk has around 300 micrograms of choline – an incredibly important nutrient for brain health, the cardiovascular system and the nervous system.

Eggs are one of the very few foods that contain naturally occurring vitamin D – essential for everything from bone building to preventing cancer. Their high sulphur content promotes healthy hair and nails. If you have thinning hair, you may want to add a few eggs to your morning repertoire – your hair will not only grow faster, but thicker and become more lustrous owing to the vitamins and B12 present.