Half the food thrown away at home is thrown away while it is still edible. The usual culprit is a drawer of vegetables that have gone limp — not rotten, just unappealing raw. Cooked, most of them are fine.
Soft is not the same as spoiled
A bendy carrot, a wrinkled pepper, a soft courgette and a tired bunch of herbs are all still food. What they have lost is water, which matters for a salad and not at all for a soup. Throw away anything with mould, a sour smell, or slime. Everything else goes in the pan.
Three dishes that take almost any vegetable
A tray roast: chop everything to a similar size, oil, salt, hot oven, forty minutes. Older vegetables roast better than fresh ones because they hold less water. A soup: soften an onion, add everything else, cover with stock or water, simmer, blend. Almost nothing can go wrong and it freezes. A fried rice or a noodle stir-fry: small pieces, high heat, a sauce. The sauce carries any vegetable that is slightly tired.
Save herbs before they blacken
Herbs are the fastest thing in the fridge to die. Chop what is left, cover with oil in an ice cube tray, freeze. They keep for months and drop straight into a pan. The same works for a half tube of tomato purée, leftover wine, and the last of a tub of cream.
Change the order you shop and cook in
Most waste comes from cooking the newest thing and pushing the older one further back. Put the oldest vegetables at the front of the fridge and cook from the front. One night a week with no shopping — cook whatever is oldest — removes most of what would otherwise be thrown away.
A drawer of soft vegetables is a roasting tray or a soup, not a bin bag. Look at what is oldest before you decide what to cook, not after.