If you’re like me, you hate wasting food. Brady and I try our very hardest to avoid food waste. It breaks my heart to toss food, but it truly upsets Brady to see food being wasted. Even when we are out to dinner, if Brady sees someone in the restaurant not take their unfinished food home he gets so upset. For a while I thought some food waste was unavoidable. Every time I would chop or peel veggies, I always had a pile of scraps that I would end up throwing away. *Tear*
THEN…
I realized all the scraps can be saved and used to make vegetable broth 😀 Talk about a game changer! All I do is save all the little veggies scraps in a freezer bag. Then, when the bag is full just boil all of the veggies in water, strain out the scraps and, voilà, you have broth. The best part? It’s practically free and it’s made from veggies that you pick out. If you do this once, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll never want to buy broth again.
Makes about 8 cups of broth
Ingredients:
- 1 gallon freezer bag full of vegetable scraps (like: onions skins, root vegetable peelings, celery tops, mushrooms stems, garlic bits, peeled broccoli stems etc.), about 2 lbs
- 16 cups of water
- Optional herbs and spices*
*This is a basic broth recipe, but you can customize it to suit the meals you’ll be making with the broth. Adding dried shiitake mushrooms, nori, whole pepper corns, parsley, thyme, rosemary or bay leaves takes your broth to the next level.
Directions:
Add all of your veggies to a large stock pot (I LOVE my stock pot), cover in water and bring to a rapid boil. Once water is boiling, turn the heat down medium-high, and let everything simmer, covered, for 2 hours (broth should be an amber color when its done). After 2 hours, turn off the heat and let the broth sit for 2 more hours or until it is at room temperature. Now that the liquid has cooled, its time to strain the veggies out. I like to use my big strainer and then use my fine mesh strainer when I’m pouring it into mason jars. At this time the broth is ready to use immediately or you can store in the fridge for up to a week, or freeze** it for up to 6 months.
**Be sure to keep your broth in an air tight jar and only fill to the “fill line.” If you over-fill your jars you will end up with broken jars and broth filled glass 🙁 (I’ve had to learn this the hard way)
