Over the last period of time I have been making more of an effort to act a bit more circular with the stuff that hangs around here. I eat a lot of veggies which will never be pre cut, but just bought (or preferbly grown by myself, but that doesn't happen in winter time though) as a whole.
That means when preparing the veggies that there is always a bit of carcass left behind. Now first of all I love giving these to my worms who create compost out of it. But they are still a bit in hibernation and eat slow and their numbers are not up to par as yet, so it also makes sense to do some other things with foodscraps.
I have been saving all kinds of small foodscraps which seem usefull in the freezer, just filling the bag up every time there is something to use. This means mostly leek tops, onion buds and carrot scraps from peeling that was stowed in the bag. And actually in no time this bag was filled with about 1 liter of scraps in there. Usefull stuff!
Instantly ready to use
Now all of these scraps will eventually turn out into a fantastic vegetable stock that with enhance any kind of dish that needs stock in there. I have learned over the last couple of months it is just super usefull to always have some of this stuff laying around in your freezer, ready to use and defrost in no time.
Vegetable stock can be made with almost anything you have laying around. It just needs a couple of basics in there. Carrot and celery as a base als some onion including the peel for the colour. The rest you can fill in yourself, but apparently stuff like broccoli makes the stock bitter.
Now I also had an old celery laying around which was starting to get yellow as a pre stage that it is starting to go bad, so it was time to take out the bag of scraps with it.
As you can see I just take everything frozen and toss it into the pan right away like this. I added the celery parts in there and also a few parsley leaves including the stems (they say the stems are essential in veggie stock, so who am I to judge for that), and also some thyme and rosemary stems from the garden. Dont forget a couple of pepper balls in there as well!
Adding enough water that everything is dunked under water I brought this to a boil and just let it simmer for a couple of hours until I was fed up with it.
Yes, the liquid evaporates and the mix reduces so you need to add some additional water here and there, depending on how strong you want the flavour.
That's it! Simmer and wait, and simmer and wait until it is ready. I left this pan to cool off over night and then made little portion bags out of it so they are easy to freeze again and ready to use. This gave me about 5 portions on 300 ml of veggie stock with this amount of food scraps. No salt added!
And just look at the colour of the stock. Isn't this how it should be?
So that is it! Use foodscraps for the worms that make compost to give to the plants that produce veggies and use those veggies to make stock out of it. Heck....why have I ony started doing this just now?
The taste is better and the price is lower!