HOW I MAKE VEGETABLE STOCK FOR SOUPS AND STEWS
I used to think that making stock from vegetable scraps was a waste of
time. I didn't see the point of producing large quantities of a
brownish liquid that would spoil before I could pour it into a dish. I
tried to make it, sure. I used to store vegetable scraps in the
freezer. Once or twice I simmer them into a stock. By that time they
had accumulated flavors of freezer burn. The outcome was not enticing.
Happily I have learned a better approach to vegetable stock. It's
easy, really: I make the stock as I need it with scraps of vegetables
that are immediately available from the current or previous meal. For
example: my harira recipe requires garlic, onion, ginger, and
carrot. Each of these things produces chaff: peelings and skins. So
after preparing the ingredients I throw them into another pot on the
stove, boil them with water, and pour the resulting stock into my
recipe. The outcome of this approach is two fold: I feel good about
extracting more nutrients from the ingredients, and I make a meal
that's just a wee bit tastier.
Of course, the implication here is that any scraps accumulated from a
recipe that doesn't need a stock get binned. That's true and I'm fine
with that. I was binning them before anyways, now I just bin them a
little less. Maybe someday I'll go back to freezing scraps, or find
another clever way of integrating them into my cooking. For now, I'm
happy with this small improvement in my kitchen.