I used to throw away all of the veggie scraps I had when I cut them up for various dishes. I would toss away the dry onion skin, the celery leaves, the ends of the carrots, etc. It dawned on me one day that since I pay per pound prices for veggies, I was literally throwing money away. I like to make my own soup bases and decided that I would start keeping the ends and scraps in a bag in the freezer. Now when I fill My Bag, I make broth with the ends and save myself some money, and end up with fresh broth. What do you do with your scraps?
I do this with my veggie scraps & my herb scraps. Like when I trim stems or pluck sprigs. It helps develop a depth of flavour in my broths with something that would have ended up in the garbage. I've considered composting but I'm not that involved in gardening quite yet.
I really should do this more, but we have a small kitchen and don't make soup that often.. That said, if I have lettuce or cabbage that seemed to be not too fresh anymore, I do put it in soup! I'll start to save onions, too. And carrots... they just get this black skin and get soft. I'll have to learn how to storage better, I guess!
Great suggestion! Another possibility is putting all the scraps into a blender, and incorporating it into hash / meat loaf / crab cakes for an extra dimension of flavor.
I put all my peelings and scraps on the compost heap. I use the compost to grow chillies in. The thing I like about doing this is that I can return my chilli stalks and leaves back to the composter and a whole new cycle of life can start.
I simply throw mine away, but this is such a fantastic idea! I think I'll definitely start doing this, and I can imagine broth from all these scraps would be delicious and nutritious too. Apparently most of the nutrients are in the skin! Thanks for the tip
I do the same. For most veggies, the entire plant is edible, so you can either eat them along with the rest of the plant or save it for other dishes or broths. I do the same.. there is very little that actually makes it to the compost here.
Same thing, ever since I bought a pressure cooker, it's so fast to make rich broths in it from scratch, that it's a shame to throw out scraps. Plus, it's rather wasteful to go out and buy all new product just to make stock - you'll be paying an arm and a leg for that pot of stock if you were doing that. By saving all the scraps, you're getting double duty out of all your veggies. Things like the tops and bottoms of celery are perfect for stocks, even if you wouldn't normally eat them raw. Same goes for the tips and ends of carrots, the cores of onions, etc... Another alternative use would be to compost with them, if you happen to run a garden of your own. My grandparents would actually save coffee grinds and egg shells - somehow they would turn those into a fertilizer of sorts. But they would also throw in some veggie scraps too. With certain vegetables, if I know I will not be able to finish the whole pack before they go bad, I will clean and chop them up and just put most of them directly into the freezer, instead of waiting for them to start to look like they are going bad. I do this in particular with fresh jalapenos - since our grocery store sells bundled packs of like 15-20 of them super cheap. I will dice up about 2/3 of them and store them in a resealable bag in the freezer, and grab a little as I need it for recipes.
