I don’t need to go to the grocery store for months — here’s how I make meals from scraps in my ‘Low Waste Kitchen’
Alessandro Vitale is known to millions on Instagram as SpicyMoustache, a heavily tattooed man with a charming Italian accent who offers tips on how to garden in urban spaces.
Vitale first went viral in 2021 when he revealed he could live off his own garden — and not spend a dollar in a grocery store — for eight months during the pandemic.
Now, he has a new cookbook, “Low Waste Kitchen: Radical Recipes for Sustainable Living,” which offers surprisingly easy recipes for repurposing what would usually end up in the trash can.
The Instagram star said he first got the idea of trying to live more sustainably from his teeny London garden.
“It was like a 40 square meter garden and we started thinking, you know, all the effort and water and time…all the resources that were going into the garden,” he told The Post.
While gardening on his tiny plot, Vitale realized he was throwing away stems and leaves and remembered his grandparents’ reverence for fresh produce.
“For my grandparents, using every part of their fruits and vegetables wasn’t just a trend but a way of life,” he wrote in his cookbook.”
“It was such a shame to waste leaves, stem, and any single thing that we could harvest from the garden,” he shared. “So we tried to think of ways that we could utilize every single part of the fruit, the vegetables that we were harvesting in the garden.”
Some of the recipes include red cabbage soup, carrot cupcakes and eggplant parmigiana.
Vitale also devoted a chapter to ginger, which is easy to grow indoors.
Ginger shot is just ginger but can be pulsed with an orange and carrot and is an “immune system booster” that is “perfect for cold and flu season.”
A ginger bug — homemade soda — uses ginger, sugar and water and is “bursting with probiotics.”
Besides food recipes, his book also includes guides for how to make your own skin salve and lip balm.
According to Vitale, whipping up a batch of mint lip balm only takes some mint (which you can grow on a windowsill), olive oil, beeswax (available online or at farmers markets) and a few drops of vitamin E oil.
Lavender skin salve can be made with just three ingredients: fresh lavender, sunflower oil and 3 tablespoons of beeswax.
He also said home chefs can turn vegetable scraps into a nutrient-rich powder, which can be sprinkled on food or used in vegetable soups to enhance flavors.
Vitale, who now has over 5 million followers on Instagram, said his popularity isn’t only thanks to “radical” recipes — he knows his artful tattoos help.
“To be honest, like I think this is great in terms of connecting with a younger audience,” he said, noting that gardening is usually connected to something that’s “time-consuming and boring, but you know you can make it fun.”
He advised first-time gardeners to “start with something easy and manageable” and explained that many plants can be grown on a balcony or windowsill.
“I would say leafy greens like lettuce are kind of easy,” he said. “And herbs. Herbs are one of the easiest. Like you can literally grow it on your windowsill and it produces so much.
“You mimic nature in any space, and nature takes care of it.”
Vitale also noted the mental health benefits that come from tending a garden and cooking.
“One of the main reasons why I started the garden in London…because I really needed some time off, like to detach from the routine and the chaos of the city,” he shared. “And connecting to the gardening world, to the natural world helps a lot to, you know, like maintain a positive state of mind.”
