Homemade Vegetable Stock

Everyday, in kitchens across the world, people are throwing away perfectly good leftover  vegetable scraps. Potato skins, carrot skins, carrot tops, onion bottoms, rinds and roots, you get the picture. I am indiscriminate in what I include in my vegetable stock base, including things as bizarre as tomato vines and avocado skins. In my experience, the more diverse the base the tastier the stock. Plus you never know just what you’ll get: once Jill and I included beet skins and ended up with ruby-colored stock. It was still delicious. If you need inspiration, take a look at the included photos. It’s like a game of I-Spy where you can try and find all the source vegetables.

A tip on building your base: I keep several old plastic storage containers in the freezer and put all of my leftover veggie scraps in the containers. Once they are all filled up, I prepare the stock by the recipe included below. Measurements are very much approximate.

Ingredients:

-vegetable base (see above, in my case this means roughly 1.5 liters of frozen vegetable bits)

- hot water (roughly a liter? Enough to cover vegetable parts completely, at least)

1. Fill a large pot with water. Add veggie base and bring to a boil.

2. Once at a boil, drop to simmer. Cover and simmer for at least one hour.

3. Strain vegetables from stock using collander, strainer, or if you’re really particular about not having bits in your broth a piece of cheesecloth. (See picture below for my particular set up)

4. Carefully pour broth into jars. Freeze or refrigerate until ready to use. (If freezing, don’t forget that the broth will expand… I filled a jar to the top, left the cap on, and threw it in the freezer. The jar cracked and leaked frozen broth cream all over the bottom of my freezer)