In my wild irresponsible youth I loved nothing more than to stay out late, eat a lot of fried fast food, buy a lot of useless crud and spend up large on whatever I felt like without a care for the health of my bank balance.

Now that I’m old and still a brunette, times have changed. I want to sleep more (and better), eat less (and better) and think a bit more about spending so that my bank balance, while never a contender for Olympic gold, can at least stay out of critical condition.

Just one look at my refrigerator bears this new regime out: I no longer fill it with things that might one day make exotic French casseroles if only I buy the other 150 ingredients. There’s nothing in that ice box that I won’t eat and if anything starts looking like it’s losing the will to live, why, I just make a muffin out of it.

After identifying the things that repeatedly lie around and look near their use-by date, I have devised the following recipe that you might like to try with your own leftovers.

S-K’s Low-fat Leftover Blueberry Banana Muffins
1 cup flour
1/3 cup rye flour (or wholemeal flour)
½ tsp baking soda
pinch salt
2 Tbsp grapeseed oil (or other flavourless oil)
1/3 cup runny honey
2 large eggs
2-3 ripe bananas (I freeze mine when they go brown and use them for baking)
1/3 cup milk or runny yoghurt (whichever smells least funky)
1 tsp pure vanilla
1 cup blueberries (fresh or frozen, or raspberries or strawberries)

Mix dry and wet ingredients separately then gently combine and add fruit. Grease muffin pan well and cook at 180 deg for 25 minutes. Makes 10 (don’t ask why!) normal-sized muffins. Eat some straight away and freeze the rest separately for mid-morning or mid-afternoon or midnight snacks.