Sunday, August 15, 2010

Homemade Vegetable Stock

So...I made homemade vegetable stock!  I saw the idea on a blog months ago, and promptly decided to start saving all of my veggie scraps in the freezer.  I kept on thinking that I didn't have enough veggies to fill my pot.  Let's just say that I definitely overestimated the size of my pot.  When I finally decided to make the stock, I could only fit maybe half of the veggies I had in the pot.  I wanted to get as much as I could out of the veggies, so I cooked everything for a total of 4 hours (Christina only did 3), and I added water to refill the pot at the 1, 2 and 3 hour marks.  I really don't have a recipe for this - like Christina, I just threw all of the veggie scraps I had been saving into the pot, added some dried and fresh herbs, and let it do its thing!  I think that my veggie scraps included onions, leeks, carrots, tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, potatoes and bell peppers.  I had frozen a bunch of wilted basil a while ago I threw in.  I also put in a big handful of garlic cloves and a few bay leaves.  At the 2 hour mark I added a generous sprinkling of herbs de provence and coarsely grated black pepper, and at the 3 hour mark I added 1 tbsp salt.  I figured I had maybe half of what Christina did, and she used 2 tbsp and said it wasn't very salty.  I thought it was a bit salty, which is why I kept on adding water when it cooked down.  Next time I would probably add a little less salt.  All in all this is a GREAT way to get everything you can out of your veggies, and make a really healthy and flavorful stock.
And I used this stock to make a really great soup!






My straining apparatus

Look at all of that stock! Almost 4 quarts!

The cooked veggies at the end - barely anything left!

2 comments:

nfmgirl said...

Yep, I started doing this about a year ago, too. I store veggie scraps in the freezer, and periodically throw a Motely assortment into a pot with some water and maybe some herbs and seasonings. However I only cook it for under an hour, as I read somewhere that it starts to get bitter after you cook it for too long, but I don't know how much truth there is to that. I just know that mine has turned out delicious! I hope you get lots of use out of your broth!

workouteatin said...

I didn't realize that about broth getting bitter. Thanks for letting me know! Mine ended up being delicious!