"Waste-not want-not, volume 2: Making your own vegetable stock"

This posting comes from my good friend Jeffrey and this practice of stuffing the freezer with veggie scraps comes from our friend John Spear who now lives in London. Take it away Jeffrey...

One of the most superbly flavorful, aromatic and useful things I make in my kitchen is essentially free. 

I'm talking about making vegetable broth from scraps and clippings... the kinds of veggie bits and pieces you would probably just throw away or squish into the garbage disposal.  These include onion tops and skins, carrot peelings, celery cores and greens, bits of leftover garlic and shallots, the goop from tomatoes when you core them, the hard bases of asparagus.  Even potato peelings, the whites and seeds from peppers, pea pods, and other sundry leftovers are useful.

I save all of these random bits and pieces in a couple 1-gallon zip-top bags in my freezer until the two bags are so chock-a-block full that my roommates start to give me cranky glares when I harp on them to save vegetable clippings.

At this point, I empty the two bags into a large soup pot, add a rounded teaspoon of salt, a couple bay leaves, and enough water to amply cover the vegetables, all on high heat on the stove.  Once the water has come to a full boil, I reduce the heat to a simmer and continue to cook for 65-75 minutes.  You can add some water midway through if too much of it evaporates while it's simmering.  After the simmering, I turn off the heat, scoop out the vegetable goop and strain the broth. You should taste the broth at this point and decide if it need to cook down more so teh flavor will intensify.

I tend to go straight from this process into making a broth-based soup (chicken or minestrone or lentil or else the corn, black bean & lime soup that my uncle taught me last Christmas.)  But if you don't have time for that, then you can freeze your broth for 2-3 months (freezing a combination of large portions of broth-filled ice-cube trays will be most useful for soups, sauces, low-fat sauteeing, risotto-making and other stuff), or it will keep refrigerated for maybe 2 weeks.

I swear to you that in the latter 20 minutes of your broth-simmering, your kitchen will never have smelled so good.  And all from stuff you would have tossed into the garbage or compost heap!

Quid pro quos to keep in mind when stowing your vegetable clippings: there are some vegetables which you should not use.  Cabbage, beets, eggplant, and Brussels sprouts come to mind.  Basically, if the vegetable is pretty darn strong or eccentric in flavor, I would think twice.  Also, use your tomato bits in thoughtful moderation.  They add great flavor, but too much of a tomato quotient and you end up with an acidic broth, which can be good in the right circumstances but limits a broth's versatility.  Lastly, chicken bones, necks and giblets can be saved in much the same way to make chicken broth. The one added step you may have is to skim off a layer of the rendered fat and schmutz that films at the top of your pot when simmering.