Last weekend, Erik and I made vegetable broth (based on an idea I read at The Simple Dollar). We made the broth for next to nothing, because we made it with leftover scraps of vegetables. In our pretty frugal life (you have to be as a grad student), we were excited to save money by not buying vegetable broth at the store, but also because we were putting scraps of vegetables to use that would have otherwise been thrown away. (Note: We'd love to compost, but we live in an apartment in the desert.)
So, how did we go about making this? Over the course of three to four weeks we made sure to save all of our veggie scraps that would have been thrown away. Examples of this include:
- The outside layer of onion that's too dry to eat, but still packed with flavor (not the papery outer-layer). We also kept the ends, or bits of onion core that were too tough for our tastes.
- The ends of a celery stalk and the leafy parts of the celery. (You can can also see in the photos that we included some celery slices. They weren't very crisp anymore, and neither of us would eat them).
- Carrot peels. I like my carrots peeled and cut, so this was a good way to use those peels.
- We also included a tomato that was about to go bad (but it hadn't gone bad yet!) that we knew we wouldn't eat in time.
We kept a gallon-sized plastic bag in our freezer where we would deposit these veggie scraps whenever we had them. It really didn't take that long to fill up!
Once the freezer bag was full, we pulled out our crock pot and filled it with frozen vegetables. That red brick on the top is frozen tomato paste (left over from when we made spaghetti bolognese). Ahh! I loved seeing all those scraps that would have been in the trash go to good use!!
Once all of the veggies are in the crock pot, we filled it up with water to the level of the vegetables. Then we had some fun. We added in a splash of olive oil, two garlic cloves, some salt, pepper, thyme, and a bay leaf. (We had thought about adding some parsley and a bit of white wine, but forgot about it at the time.) Then we put the lid on, set the heat on high, and waited four hours. Mmmm.... vegetable smells filled the apartment!
After four hours, we poured the veggies and broth through a strainer into a pot (Oven mitts are a MUST because your crock pot will be very hot!).
Here is the delicious broth that we were left with! It's so red because it's a bit heavy on the tomato because of the whole tomato and tomato paste.
When we put the broth into containers I was shocked to see that we got 12 cups of broth out of this! We froze the three smaller containers for later use, and we used the large container of broth to make risotto yesterday.
It was so much fun to make our own veggie broth! I am looking forward to doing it again (we had too many veggies to fit in the crock pot this time, so I'm sure it won't be long before we fill up another bag in the freezer). It just felt really nice to know what exactly was going into our food, and to know that (while we weren't reducing any waste--the vegetable scraps still got thrown away afterward) we were getting an additional use out of scrap veggies before throwing them out. No worries though! When we move back to MN we will be composting those scraps afterwards.
