It so happened that there were a large aubergine and a courgette in the fridge, about to go off. What a disaster! Unsure of what arcane concoction would call for both a squash and a nightshade, our old friend sous-chef Google came to the rescue. Turns out there’s a recipe specifically involving both of these fringe fruits.

Tasty.

We veganed it up by replacing the cheese with breadcrumbs and cashew nuts, mixed with some margarine. The (delicious) result:

Before:

And after:

It’s been a little while since we last updated; there have been more dives since. Delicious sweet things have been discovered in a special bin.

This is best done with fruit, but you can drop the sugar, swap in some veg and some savoury spices for a deadly veggie dinner. Anyways, this recipe consists of two parts: crust and filling. The crust is pretty simple.

Start with some butter. Butter is expensive and usually the limiting factor in this kind of thing. To make a decent sized pie, you’ll need about a regular mug sized lump of butter. Put the butter in a big mixing bowl or any kind of cavernous thing. Toss in some flour. Mash until the flour is all blended with the butter. Keep adding a bit of flour and mashing until you have a nice dry dough. If you overflour, which I did, just use some soy milk to make the crumbs stick. Now for the best part! Sugggar. Add as much as you like, basically. A good guideline is about four tablespoons, but with a fruit tart, it doesn’t really matter if the crust is not that sweet. So to recap:

• Mug o’ Butter (or about 150g)
• Roughly Mug and a half o’ Flour
• Few tablespoons of sugar
• Bit of soy milk

The important thing is to mash the dough until it’s fairly consistent. Hard floury lumps in pastry aren’t really all that pleasant. If you want a savoury crust, you can just swap the sugar for a teaspoon of salt above. And maybe some herbs, who knows. Go crazy! Next, the delicious contents.

I used two goodly-sized cooking apples and three smallish pears. Peel them and slice them up widthwise into crisp-sized slices as thin as possible. That’s it!

Find a thin, wide dish of whatever shape you like to cook the pie in. It needs sides about a centimetre high, maybe less depending on how much fruit you want in it. Put the dough in the dish, squash it out evenly so it touches all the sides, and is mostly consistent in thickness. Place the fruit slices on, covering the base roughly equally everywhere. Sprinkle as much sugar as you like on, and some cinnamon or whatever other sweet spice you like too - ground cloves are wonderful. Put the dish in the oven at 180C/375F for twenty minutes. Take it out, squeeze half a lemon over it, more sugar, and back in for another five minutes. Remove and let cool! Since there’s so much hot sugar, really do let it cool, you don’t want lip blisters. Recap of fillings:

• 2 Cooking apples (regular will do)
• 3 Pears
• Sugar
• Spices
• Half a lemon

Le fait accompli:

Skipilicious.

Edit: Obv. you can vegan this up by switching the butter for margarine. If you do, you might want to add a tiny bit of salt to preserve the taste.

Today we hit the streets early and scooped this haul. This is two heads of frisé, a head of cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli two turnips, a bunch of cooking apples and pears, and a pineapple, of which there were many today! The pineapple was gone probably less than an hour after getting home.

The pears and apples were put to good use in an utterly delicious open tart! Recipe up soon.

Measurements are rough; we roll freestyle!

Get:

• a kilo of taters
• a few carrots; three or four
• an onion
• some peas
• whatever other veggies are around (celery is lovely; we had none)
• some veggie stock
• salt, pepper, as many delicious herbs as possible. (we used marjoram, thyme, oregano, basil, rosemary, turmeric, and a sprinkle of paprika)

Toss all the roughly chopped veggies in a pot with some water. Boil until the veggies are softened enough to smush with a little difficulty.

Add all the herbs and stock and stuff. Boil for a further few minutes. Put in a blender.

Pulse a little, not enough to smush all the veggies. Serve and enjoy! This made about enough to do three two-person dinners; stoup is mad filling.

I like to refer to this as ‘bin juice’ to freak out my non-freegan friend(s).

Enjoy!

Very slim pickings today, but we suspect we arrived too late to our scavenging places. Hanging around from 5PM seems like the only way to ensure things aren’t snapped up. Today on Moore St. there were Dublin City Council workers sitting on the stalls in preparation for the daily cleanup of the area, and for some reason, a fairly hefty Garda presence (foot patrol of two and a squad car). Nevertheless, we found enough to survive on!

That’s about 2Kgs of potatoes, a bunch of perfectly ripe bananas (unsplit today!), a roughly fist-sized beetroot and a courgette with just a tiny overripe patch at one end. We also found some overripe aubergines, but decided not to take any.

A critical discussion of the perception of dumpster diving among the Irish public.

Excellent Crimethinc documentary about skip diving in France and the Netherlands.