Heather Horton used to plan her meals around cookbook recipes, and if that meant buying obscure ingredients she'd never use again, well, that's what she did.

That all-too-familiar behavior leads to a pantry that stays filled with aging ingredients that eventually go to waste. But, as Horton has learned, it's easy -- and tremendously cost-effective, with an estimated $300-400 in monthly savings for her family of four -- to change things up.

Especially with spring cleaning season around the corner, now is a great time to clean out those kitchen shelves. But don't discard food; make use of it as you're cleaning up. Food waste is coming under increasing fire around the world. By some estimates, 40 percent of food in the United States gets discarded, and 25 percent of the country's methane emissions are produced as that food rots in landfills. According to a 2010 study, 31,055 tons of food gets thrown away every year within Boulder County alone, and that doesn't include compost.

The United Nations Environment Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization just launched a campaign, Think.Eat.Save, to reduce food waste around the world, and in Boulder County, the EPA worked with officials on a pilot project in November, Too Good to Waste, testing out food waste reduction strategies.

So as you go through the kitchen, keep these tips in mind to avoid temptation to trash those random ingredients -- and so you don't run out to buy 10 more ingredients just to use up some rice or mushrooms you have sitting around.

Horton, a marketing and communications consultant in Erie, has learned to prepare meals based on what's in the house. For one, she scans her shelves for ingredients that naturally go well together.


Whether it's Indian or Italian or Mexican, she said, "I go through the process of: What common theme can I see out of the ingredients I'm looking at?"

Mary Collette Rogers, owner of Everyday Good Eating and cooking instructor who has taught Horton in her classes, thinks it should be a constant mindset.

"Whenever you're in there digging for a can of refried beans," she said, be thinking, "what other Mexican foods do I have here that I want to use up?"

Both women also consult the internet -- which is perhaps the most important, if obvious, resource to keep in mind. There's a recipe out there for any food you can think of -- even a broccoli stalk soup. Search for three random ingredients, "and you pull up 17 different dishes," Rogers said. "You're bound to have ingredients for one of them. And if you don't have all of them, you can reasonably get across most of the dish."

There's no shortage of dedicated recipe websites. If you bought a roast chicken you don't know what to do with, you can first consult StillTasty.com to learn its shelf-life and storage tips. You may decide to use part of it tonight, and freeze the rest for a week or so. Then use allrecipes.com to search for a dish that uses roast chicken and, say, cilantro, and you'll come up with a chicken chili recipe that might appeal to you -- or try it with tomato sauce and you'll get chicken cacciatore. The potential is endless.

Look for apps, such as 222 Million Tons, that help you plan weekly menus so you use up all your perishables, or Green Egg Shopper, which can organize your groceries by expiration date so you know what to use first. (Use-by and sell-by dates, by the way, are a big reason for waste; the food is often still safe after those dates.

Dana Frasz, director of the Food Shift project, advises people to use common sense and go by sight, smell and taste to judge a food, rather than dates on the packaging.)

Rogers also encourages people to modify recipes, either through substitution or enhancement, based on what's in their kitchen.

"If a recipe calls for pickles, what else do you have on hand that combines those salty and sour flavors?" she says. Or if you have some grains in your pantry, think about some of your go-to dishes that involve grains and how one might taste with a different grain -- barley instead of rice, perhaps.

Enhancing food, she said, is "where cooking gets fun." If it's an obscure ingredient you're trying to get rid of, even better.

Her advice is simple: "How can you enhance a dish with some of these odd ingredients -- because that's what you bought them for in the first place." (If you're trying out a new flavor combination, however, she does advise taste-testing a small portion before adding something to an entire recipe.)

Rogers also suggests finding a good pantry cookbook, which can help you design entire meals out of ingredients you're likely to have in there.

Another tip: get comfortable with flexible dishes where an array of otherwise-mismatched ingredients can be an asset to the dish -- burritos, salads and stews, for example. That allows you to use up whatever quantities you happen to have on hand.

The bottom line is to be creative. "My husband will look in the fridge and see nothing," Horton said. "I'll look and see five different meals."