What to Do With Leftover Veggie Scraps

Making vegetable broth at home is possibly the easiest recipe you will ever make at home.

Inspired by Grist's article about "Five Packaged Foods You Never Need to Buy Again", my do-it-yourselfer boyfriend and I decided to start making our own vegetable broth.

All you have to do is: reserve the odds and ends of vegetables, store in a container in the freezer, and when the container is full, cover with water and simmer for at least an hour. Really, it's that simple.

1. Find a large container that you can keep in the freezer (freezer bags work well too).
2. When you are chopping up vegetables, keep the freezer container handy. Throw all loose vegetable ends in the container: onion ends and skins, tomato and bell pepper tops. We also throw in vegetables that are close to expiring that we know we aren't going to have time to use.
3. After the container is full (this may take a few weeks depending on the size of your container and how often you cook), pour all the frozen veggies into a large kettle and cover with water. Be careful not add too much water, you want the broth to have a lot of vegetable flavor.
4. Bring the veggies to a boil and then let simmer for an hour.
5. After an hour, turn the heat off and let the vegetables sit and stew for a bit longer.

We have found that we get the best results when there is a good variety of vegetables and not too much of just one thing. One of the first batches that we made had several spinach stems. Spinach actually tastes much different here in Panama as it is much more bitter, so the broth ended up tasting like bitter spinach. Most recently we threw in three forgotten radishes from the bottom of the vegetable drawer. These radishes gave the broth a really wonderful deep reddish brown color. We usually throw in a couple extra cloves of garlic and fresh herbs from our urban garden for good measure.
 

What I love about homemade vegetable broth:

• Saving Money. We are not spending $3-4/package on salty, vegetable broth that has been sitting on the store shelves for weeks (possibly months). 
• Eating Healthier. There is no added salt or preservatives! 
• Reducing Waste. We are eliminating some of our waste. After we use the vegetables for the broth, we dry it out a bit and then add it to the compost.

We also typically try to make a recipe that calls for several cups of broth on the same day. Our favorite go-to is Spicy Red Lentil Dal. The remaining broth can either be frozen, or stay up to 10 days in an air-tight container in the fridge.

Looking for other ways to use that homemade broth?

1. Instead of water, use vegetable broth to cook couscous and rice.
2. Use the homemade veggie stock as a base for soups.
3. Tired of sipping on coffee in the afternoon? Heat up vegetable stock and drink your afternoon snack!