As we gather with family and friends this holiday season, many of the gatherings will center around food.

With inflation driving up the cost of many ingredients, you may be wondering how you can make your dollar stretch a little farther.

According to U.S. News and World Report, weekly, food costs for a family of four varies from $225 a week on the low end to $365 on the high end.

On the last episode of Kentucky Health host Dr. Wine Talks and talked with award winning executive chef Christopher Stallard about how to get the most out of your food by making delicious dishes from scraps.

From your experience.

Are we really wasting a lot of food in our kitchens?

Yes, absolutely.

And I think a lot of it just has to do with convenience, not really being if you're not a chef or a home enthusiast, even you may not know what to do or that that's even possible to do with some of your vegetable scraps or meat scraps, for that matter.

So in restaurants, you know, we operate on super thin margins.

Everything is looked at as a dollar sign when it comes to your ingredients.

And so the more you throw away, the more money you're throwing away.

So it's what can I do with all of these things to make something delicious and presentable to the guest and make a little bit more money on the ingredients themselves.

When we talk about a food scrap, what is it that we are actually referring to?

Well, it could be any number of things.

And you might even be considered waste, which I cover in the book.

Even stuff like animal fats, bacon, fat, you know, everybody had grandmother's saved bacon fat to make gravy and whatnot.

But there's a lot of other things that we can do with it and that's discussed in there.

There's pickled brains and brains from the caper jar and all of these things that typically people will take the pickles out and just dump the brine down.

They can be used to make wonderful marinades or vinaigrette or any number of things.

And that's also in there.

And so it's really just kind of like taking a second look at what's in the jar, what's on the cutting board and saying, before I throw this away, is there anything that I can do with it?

So you can see that full interview with Chef Stallard, with Dr. Wayne Tuckson right now by going online at Eat Dawg and looking for Kentucky Health.

And be sure to tune in for new episodes on Sundays at 130 Eastern in the afternoon, 1230 Central right here on KCET.