I read about this idea somewhere else a while back, and don’t recall where I read it, so oops – no hat tip to whomever posted it somewhere, but it was a great tip!
Place a container in the refridgerator and through the week, rather than toss the scraps of fresh, raw food into garbage, instead place in the container (onion ends, carrot ends, cabbage cores, shavings from potatoes, etc). The scraps will add up and at the end of the week, cook them up in large pan with water for 20 minutes or so and you will have the makings of soup stock. Drain the liquid via strainer into bowl, saving the liquid and discarding the now cooked scraps.
You can now use the soup stock to make soups, adding fresh raw food ingredients, ie, onions, potatoes, carrots, root vegetables, pasta, macaroni, beans, grains like barley or bulghur.
In the summer months, when I’m working on my vegetable garden, all the saved scraps go into compost bin. In winter, though, here in Pacific Northwest, where it rains more than there is sun, I don’t work the compost, and it almost hurts to discard scraps of fresh, raw food into the garbage. Finding another way to use the scraps to make weekender soups in the colder months is a workable idea for us.
I’ve made soups the last 2 weekenders using this idea and I call them surprise soups because not sure what I’m going to get for soup stock. For example, I had used several apples one week, so had apple peelings, along with cabbage core. I knew the soup stock , using these scraps would be on the sweet side, so I wanted to make a kind of curry or ginger winter squash soup on the order of pumpkin soup. That way I could use up some of my left over summer squash as well. This week, I had carrot peelings, another cabbage core, and I had pulled fresh beets from the garden so tossed in the leave stocks, knowing it will produce a red, root vegetable flavored stock. I will be adding tomato base and something along the order of potatoes, carrots, beans and make a version of vegetable type soup.
