Thursday, January 9, 2014

Veggie Stock Adventures



I've been thinking about a minor detail of my 2013 a lot lately. That little detail of carrying my own reusable grocery bag. Such a little thing to be happy about. I think about the other little details I got better at in 2013. I started riding the bus more and driving less. I'm better at recycling cardboard and paper. I think I've doubled my recyclable materials. That's not to say I'm even doing 100%. In fact, I'm admittedly not. And I'm not talking about this now to say we all need to do more and yada yada. I'm saying this now because it's little somethings that I've been doing more of and it just feels good. I write this because I like it.

So last year I minimally cut down on my garbage and my CO2 emissions. And this year (all 9 days of it), I've been thinking about my food waste. I've definitely started buying less produce in the attempt to use a higher percent of it. I also just ordered a compost bin for my kitchen counter since my neighbor has a big bin outside that I've never contributed to due to laziness, pure and simple. I recently read an article roughly titled "make your food go further"... or maybe it was more like a buzzfeed than an article... who am I kidding? One of the tips was to save your vegetable scraps for the week and make stock from it. Combine the 'article' and a sick neighbor and tonight I ended up in the kitchen.

I used an onion shell and butt, mushroom stems, some dried mushrooms that I've attempted to cook with several times and just plain don't like the texture of them revived but still they sit in my cupboards, garlic butts, a sprig of oregano and some carrots and beans to lessen the stock pile in the fridge. Boiled all of that down and strained it out for a made-from-scratch broth. I'm generally not a maker-from-scratcher and can honestly say I've never even attempted making soup from scratch. It turned out pretty well. Not amazing, but certainly edible. Mostly I'm just a little bit proud of myself and wanted to document it.



   














          



Wednesday, January 1, 2014