Save Your Soup Stock!

The days have been sunny and crisp and the leaves are really starting to fall. It's autumn! We're in the thick of fall right now and what we want to know is - do you save your scraps to make soup stock?

We're heading into the depths of soup season. Soup is one of those magical foods that can be made in a million ways, but at its heart it always contains a good, seasoned stock. You can buy that stock (or broth) when you need it but you can also make it at home! If you're a meat eater, you probably already know the virtues of boiling chicken carcasses, but did you know that you can use the same trick for veggies?

Here's how: grab a plastic bag (ziploc or shopping bag) or a container that can fit into your freezer easily. Keep it on hand when you're chopping veggies for a stir fry, making a salad, or using some onion in your morning omelet. Everything you don't use in the meal you're immediately making? Put into that freezer bag. That includes carrot tops, onion ends, herb stems, parsley that's just not fresh enough to eat, well, fresh but still fine to boil-- put it all in. Leave out anything that's moldy, but otherwise if it's a scrap, it can be used to make stock.

Collect your scraps over the week instead of sending those bits out to the compost and at the end of the week, dump it all into a big pot, add water and salt (if you want) and boil it for several hours, until the veggies are so soft they're falling apart and the water is darkened and deeply flavoured. Bonus: your house will smell amazing all afternoon.

Strain out the solid matter (now you get to compost it!) and save the stock you just made by either storing it in the fridge for up to a few days or by freezing it. Voila! Next time you need some broth, just reach into your freezer and defrost a container. If you go through a lot of vegetables, you can make stock on a weekly basis and ensure you always have some around when you need it.

Use your tasty homemade stock to add to soups, stews, risotto, casseroles-- you name it! There is no end to its usefulness.

Some strong-flavoured vegetables can overpower homemade stock to make sure you want your soups to taste like cabbage, for instance, before adding anything in the cabbage family. Everything else is pretty easy-going. Do not add any green parts from plant in the nightshade family (tomato, pepper, potato, eggplant, etc) as those parts contain toxins that are harmful to your system. Never use anything that has black mold on it or any rotten meat parts.