I use a lot of veggie broth. In soup bases, in rice dishes, sometimes I dump a little in when cooking vegetables. Since I hate to pay for it, I've gotten into a habit of freezing the ends and discards from vegetables I'm cooking or the ones at the end of the week that are unused. Apparently my husband has never watched me make stock because this was our conversation:
Hubby: Mmm vegetable soup.
Me: No I'm making stock.
Hubby: Isn't it really the same thing?
Me: No you don't want to eat this, it the butts of vegetables and throw away parts.
Hubby: THAT'S how you make stock?!
Me: Yup.
Hubby: It's like the hot dogs of vegetables.
Ok he's kinda right. But the stock is the same whether I use the celery or the celery leaves that get cut off and I'm not going to buy a bunch of veggies to make stock since that defeats my cheap-y purpose. So since it's stuff I'm throwing away, it's like free stock!
This is the best way to collect your vegetables: All week every piece you cut off a vegetable (except that papery part of the onion, it makes bitter stock), wash, and toss into a big gallon zip lock back and keep it in the freezer. I just keep adding to this with everything I make. Then at the end of the week or when you would normally throw away any ok veggies that you aren't going to use, throw those in the freezer too.
Veggie Stock:
- Large gallon size bag of frozen saved veggies
- Water
- Peppercorns - depending on size of Crockpot, usually 6-10 peppercorns
- bay leaf
- salt to taste
Cover your veggies in water in the Crockpot, add peppercorns and bay leaf. Turn on low until the veggies are very very tender usually about 6-8 hours depending on your slow cooker. Using a fine mesh strainer, strain all of the veggies out of the broth. You may need to do this a few times to make sure there are no vegetable pieces.
After it's strained and cooled, I pour them into ice cube trays and freeze so that there are smaller sizes of broth to use in future recipes.
These are my veggies going into the next batch:
These are my veggies going into the next batch:
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