To reduce food waste at home, make an easy stock out of vegetable scraps

Call it "Scrap stock" or maybe "Compost Caldo"

I’ve been thinking about food waste this week, so I wanted to share with you a basic stock recipe that uses food scraps, the bits and pieces of vegetables that we usually throw away (or better yet, compost!).

This week’s scraps

This is a recipe that I published a few years ago in my book Vegetables Unleashed, which I wrote with my friend Matt Goulding. We also included a recipe for a normal vegetable stock, with onions and garlic and carrots and celery, but I’ve always thought this one is more interesting. It’s also very versatile, so you should get creative with it, depending on whatever you have in your fridge or collected in your freezer…you can always collect scraps in a bowl, then make stock when you have enough. Carrot and potatoes peels, broccoli and cauliflower stems, zucchini and eggplant tops, garlic and onion peels, corn husks and cobs – it’s all good for this stock. Or just pull straight from your compost bin (before it’s compost, obviously!)…the scraps will both be roasted and boiled, so no one has to worry about health concerns. The key pieces are the dried mushrooms and kombu, which give it a savory umami flavor that will give extra depth to any dish you use it in – it’s a perfect base for any soup or stew.

Scraps, plus some kombu and dried shiitakes hidden in there somewhere, made a nice stock!

Scrap Stock

Makes about 3 quarts