A huge amount of food gets thrown away every day. Some is never picked, rotting in the field. Some is never sold, and chucked out at the supermarket. But a lot of food waste – about 60% – is from food that's binned at home. In fact, on average, each person in the UK wastes £250 worth of food each year.

Most food waste is because of forgotten ingredients going off. Boxes of berries go mouldy, spinach wilts etc. However, a big reason food gets thrown away – 25% of all waste by weight, and 29% by cost – is simply because people cooked too much. In other words, unwanted leftovers. At Christmas, a time when leftovers, perishable cheese and rapidly wilting vegetables are piled sky-high, it's easier than ever to end up throwing away food.

 We've got a few different styles of recipes and ideas to help prevent this: dinners to make with oft-forgotten cheeses and herbs, delicious cocktails which use fruit scraps and a wintery Caesar salad which uses crisp roasties in the place of croutons. We hope they'll help you make the most of your ingredients at Christmas, and salvage all those delicious leftovers.

Herbs are obviously brilliant – they effortlessly bring colour, aroma and flavour to pretty much any dish you can imagine. However, their one drawback is they don’t last very long. This simple herb oil is a great way to use up any soft herbs you might have lying around – and makes a beautiful garnish in and of itself.

Chantelle Nicholson is known for her environmentally-conscious style of food and drinks, and this light apple fizz with Discarded Grape Skin Vodka is no exception. Made with apple peel and cores, it’s the perfect use for flavourful apple scraps that might otherwise be thrown away. It’s designed to use the leftover apple cores from her Baked Apple and Miso Shortcake, but would work well with leftovers from crumble or pie too.

Speaking of cocktails, make sure to save the peel when juicing fresh citrus. It can be used in so many different ways - infused salts, sugars and oil, candied into sweet garnishes or even dehydrated and brewed into tea. One of our favourite ways to use it is in homemade candied peel, which can be used whole as decoration or chopped up and used in fruitcakes and buns. Check out our guide to using up citrus peels in all kinds of delicious ways.

So, it’s the week after Christmas. You’ve had more sprouts than you thought humanly possible and yet you still have leftovers filling up the fridge. This recipe is perfect – it uses up leftover roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts in the place of croutons in a Caesar salad. It’s light and crunchy but still perfectly wintery. You won’t feel like you’re eating leftovers for the fourth day in a row, but you’ll still clear out the fridge. Win-win!

This simple cocktail uses the skin and cores of pears to make a pear-infused syrup, which forms the base of a refreshing Discarded Banana Peel Rum colada. The batched cocktail is easy to scale up or down for serving at parties, so you don’t need to be worried about fiddling about mixing drinks.

If you’ve got some leftover cranberry sauce to finish, why not try it in this magnificent sandwich? The recipe uses brie, but any mild cheese would work well, and you can use up whichever soft herbs you have in the pesto, from tarragon to mint.

Cauliflower cheese is such a warming dish, and it’s also a great way to use up scraps and odds and ends of cheese. Do you have some parmesan that’s looking peaky? Cheddar that’s past its best? Chuck it in – almost anything will work well in this forgiving, simple sauce.

Panettone is one of the highlights of Christmas. They’re so tempting in their gorgeous boxes though, it’s easy to go overboard and end up with more than you can easily finish! This panettone bread and butter pudding is perfect for using up any leftover or stale panettone that you have. And, as Rachel notes in her introduction, you could also use some leftover croissants or pain au chocolat for extra decadence.