Watermelon leather and Carrot crisps

Who knew! Take (prety much) any left over fruit or vegetable peelings and create fruit pastel sweets or soup AND crisps.

Firstly: watermelon leather. Plenty of recipes out there for fruit leathers. So easy. I'd left some watermelon slices out overnight by accident and they'd dried out a bit. Made a fruit leather from them. Crushed the peeled and de-pipped fruit with a hand blender and let the pulp drain overnight through a sieve.

Then mixed the resultant pulp with granulated sugar (white or brown - doesn't matter). Ratio of 10 to 1 - so for every 100g of pulp, add 10g sugar (personally I found this too sweet - although it's what most recipes suggest - so I halved it i.e. 100g pulp to 5g sugar).

Then spread it out on a baking tray lined with a silicone mat or greaseproof paper until it's half a centimetre thick. Bake for 3-5 hours in an oven at 75c /150f/Gas1 until it's dehydrated completely and has become pliable - like a sweet chew. Roll up and slice into small sweets.

So.....a little later in the week I had a stack of carrot peelings left over from making a carrot tarte tatin and decided to make a butter bean and carrot soup.

Take a good three to four handfuls of peelings, add a litre of homemade vegetable stock (see episode one) and simmer until tender. Blend, pass through a sieve, season to taste, add a tin of butterbeans, thicken with a teaspoon of cornflour mixed into a slack with a tablespoon of cold water. Job done.

BUT then I had a load of left over carrot pulp after blending and sieving.

Hmmmmmm.......

As per the watermelon leather I decided I'd dehydrate it in the oven to see what happens.

Well what you get are carrot crisps. Amazing!

A few tips on dehydrating carrot pulp (note: substitute parsnips, swede, celeriac - quite possibly any veg pulp - and le me know the outcome)

Tip 1 - don't add sugar but instead add salt or spice - I used a teaspoon of thai paste

Tip 2 - shape the pulp into coins before dehydrating

Tip 3 - if the result isnt pretty enough for your liking smash them up with a rolling pin to make a crumb to use on top of a sherpherd's pie or somesuch.

All from carrot peelings - proper waste not want not from the SOS kitchen