Make your own veggie stock!

This is not so much a recipe as a recommendation. All you do to make stock is boil veggies and herbs in water and then strain it. It’s worth a post, though, because seriously everyone can do this and I’m embarrassed that I’d never tried it before.

The reason is that I never thought I had enough vegetables to make a stock. Now I definitely do, with the CSA: although I can finish most of my share, I just don’t eat a lot of onions (which are plentiful right now), and even if I freeze some of the fresh herbs there is still a lot of them. So I started keeping a freezer bag that I’d just add leftovers to every week.
And once I’d started a bag for my vegetable waste, I realized that I’d just been wasting edible vegetables all this time. Seriously! You know how fresh herbs always come in a quantity that is slightly more than you need? I often chop and freeze herbs into ice cubes, but the stems or even whole bunches of herbs can go in the pot. The carrots that get a little wibbly after hanging out in the so-called crisper too long? Chop them up. The little leaves that grow on broccoli stems that you usually throw away when you’re chopping the broccoli? Why not! I could have been keeping a freezer bag of stock veggies for years instead of buying so many cartons of broth at Whole Foods (I cook with broth a lot).

The stock Elana and I made contains: beet leaves and stems that were too fibrous to eat, rainbow chard that started to wilt, lots and lots of spring onion, parsley sage rosemary and thyme, chives, broccoli leaves, baby carrots leftover from a party, quite a bit of lettuce, the knobby bits of garlic scapes, the saturated cloves of garlic from a rosemary oil-infusing experiment, cucumber slices, half a head of cabbage, the green leafy bits from a head of cauliflower, maybe six grape tomatoes from a different party, and celery. Just to be fancy, we first browned the onions in leftover rosemary oil and softened them in cooking sherry until the sherry boiled off a bit. We then filled my huge stockpot 3/4 full with these veggies (the cabbage took up a lot of room) and just covered them in water, adding soy sauce, salt and pepper, coriander, and more wine. We felt it tasted a little “green” and one-note, so we added more soy sauce and Worschestershire sauce for depth… I imagine that will be less of an issue when we get less lettuce and more root veggies, although I will miss turning handfuls of parsley into soup.
Anyway, we ended up with nearly five quarts of delicious broth, but there’s no need to do that much at one time.

The only thing I’d change is our method for straining. The veggies cook way down, but they still hold a lot of water, so even after running everything through my colander we ended up squeezing veggie mush with our hands (hilarious) until we’d extracted another pint or so of broth. I could see the point of having cheesecloth or a soup stock or something… recommendations welcome.

I am going to make a kale and kielbasa soup with my broth!