So, I've been seeing this all over the internet, but the place I first read about it was here. I make my own stock, but it never occurred to me to use my scraps. When the vegetables in the fridge look sad, I often make soup and I've frozen individual vegetables before for soup but this was a new idea...
I stuck a large container in the freezer and starting filling it up. I think it took about 10 days to fill. We call it the garbage soup container. When it was full I dumped it in a pot and added a couple of carrots and onions and some celery.
I actually moved it to a much larger pot after I took this picture and it's a good thing I did. It was full once I added the fresh vegetables!
I ended up with 16 cups of broth - I've been using it with an equal amount of chicken broth for most of my recipes. It's good.
I used egg shells the first time around, but I've left them out since and I haven't really noticed a difference. Because I'm mixing it with chicken bone broth, there's going to be calcium in it anyway.
Where I compost, I can include cooked food, so I was happy to be able to compost the cooked up mushy stuff that I made the stock from.
Yum! Try it! I couldn't believe how much scrap "garbage" we generate!
Is this Soup good for Human consumption ?
ReplyDeleteIt's fine for human consumption - all of the scraps have been cleaned and everything is still good - mouldy food or food that is going bad shouldn't be used...before I peeled the apples, carrots and potatoes, they were cleaned the same way I'd clean them if we were going to eat them with the skin on. I pulled any skin off the onions that was dirty or dusty...the scraps we used aren't actually garbage in the sense that they're unusable, but they're parts of our fruit and vegetables that we would normally end up throwing out. You can use things in the stock that you wouldn't normally eat - the core of a cabbage, stalks from broccoli or cauliflower if you don't normally eat them or they are tough or the recipe you're making doesn't call for them...it's all good.
ReplyDeleteGood idea!! I'm totally doing this!!
ReplyDeleteGreat idea! Now I will separate my scraps into the 'worm bin pile' and the 'soup stock pile'... I'll give all the sketchy stuff to the worms. So do you even include various rind peels & cores? Papaya? Banana? Orange peel? or just veggies?
ReplyDeleteI left out the citrus and banana peels - I thought they'd taste yucky (and I think the woman I linked to suggested they wouldn't work - I'm too lazy to check right now!). I didn't think avocado would work well, but I used apple and pear peels and cores...there's some zucchini in there too. I think I probably wouldn't put the skin in unless is could be usually eaten - like probably no rinds from melons or thick winter squash skins. I bet the pulpy, stringy, seedy mass that you scoop out of squash would work well.
ReplyDelete