Vegetable Broth made from Scrap!

Hello Positive Eaters,

As promised I decided to experiment with making my own vegetable broth. I often buy prepackaged boxes of broth from the store. These seem to work quite well, however most are still pretty high in sodium and probably missing many nutrients due to long shelf lives. For those of you who follow this blog, you probably noticed that I really like soup. So making my own broth is a great thing for me to learn.

A friend who I am advising, recently got struck with diverticulitis and was off solid food. He told me how much he missed vegetables...which was music to my ears! I suggested drinking vegetable broth. He was wary to do so due to the high sodium content in most prepackaged broths. I told him he should make his own. Then I realized, I never attempted this myself. We both set out to make our own broths that week.

As luck would have it, Tal Ronnen's cookbook that I recently got as a gift, recommended making your own broth by saving your vegetable scraps from the week. This includes peels, ends of vegetables usually tossed away, rinds, seeds, vegetables gone limp, leaves and anything else you might have lying around. The idea of making a nutritious food out of garbage was too exciting not to try. I saved my vegetable scraps for five days.



The rest of the equation is really quite simple. Put these in a pot with water and bring up to a boil, then back off the heat and let them simmer for a long time. I decided to make this process even easier by making the broth in a rice cooker, since that backs off to a simmer automatically for me. I minced up some shallots that were hanging out for the past week and put in some fresh kale to up the nutrient and taste profile and let the rice cooker do its thing.



I actually went to bed and let this simmer over night. I woke up at 2am and snuck out to the kitchen to see how it was coming. I was blown away by the pleasant aroma the broth gave off. Remember, the majority of the items in this pot would normally be thrown out or composted. This was the most pleasant smelling garbage ever. In the morning I strained away the scraps and added a little salt, sage, rosemary and thyme to the broth. I heated this up and gave it a taste.



This was a flavorful, nutrient dense broth that I was so excited about I invited friends over for soup. I made a quick soup that involved sauteeing garlic and adding celery and carrots. Then I added the broth and added portabello mushrooms and scallions. Everyone loved it...it is safe to say I will be making my own broth from now on!

Stay Positive,

Matthew

PS

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