All Year Long; Easy Peasy Veggy Scrappy
Perhaps seemingly mysterious, but actually incredibly simple – a model for simplicity, versatility, and usability – home brewed veggie stock is an easy year-round staple for the kitchen that just happens right under your nose.
If you ask 100 folks, you probably would get 100 techniques. This is mine:
Keep all your veggie scraps, and herb castoffs such as stems from thyme. Yes, ALL of them. Everything from your cooking is usable in my experience, contrary to what you may read from other sources. It’s not uncommon to read about the necessity to keep those bitter parts out of your stock mix, things such as certain greens. But I’m here to tell you, just toss everything you’ve got in. But…….Keep the balance. Now, if you overdo one type of scrap or another, the stock will certainly become unbalanced. So if you just bought a half bushel of beets and you throw all the trimmings from the beets in that you just cut up for roasting, guess what will happen to your stock? Beet red is correct. But hey, you want some good borscht base instead of water don’t you? And…….Keep out the rotten or moldy pieces of scraps. I don’t fret too carefully over excluding things, there’s often pieces of leaves, or small stem of twig pieces, maybe even some soil or sand, in the end, your going to strain all of that out anyway. But, for the sake of some quality control, I think it’s a good idea to toss those rotty or moldy parts right into your compost bucket.Keep them in a container of your choice in your freezer until you have a big enough quantity of savings to start the brewing. I reuse a 1-gallon plastic ziplock bag over and over, for years on end, and find that the amount of scraps collected in one of these size bags is generally enough to make about 3 quarts of stock, keeping in mind that every batch will differ based upon what scraps you have added. Add everything from your savings into a crockpot, and fill up the pot with water to cover everything inside. I then add a pinch or two of salt, and a dose of white vinegar to help pull out and meld the flavors of the variety of scraps in the batch. Add anything else that you might want to from your home herb garden, we have a potted bay tree in the dining room and fresh bay leaves can be a great addition to the stock pot.Aside, I do recommend you getting your own potted bay tree, it has turned out to be one of the easiest house plants to care for, and it has grown to over 5 feet tall in a couple years, with hundreds of fresh bay leaves that are at our fingertips when cooking. I put the crockpot on high and leave it go for 4 hours, often at night, and then check the flavor in the morning. It should be ready to use at this point. Next, grab the smallest meshed strainer you have, and a bowl to catch the liquid, and pour the batch right on through. I then transfer to mason jars, add lids and rings, and place in the fridge where it will last a long time – weeks even. But if you don’t get round to sieving and storing in the fridge right away, don’t worry! I often leave the stock and veggie scraps in the crockpot for days, maybe reheating for an hour each day, cause, other priorities. That’s how forgiving making this can be.
Now that you have it ready and sittin’, what do you use it for.
Use stock to cook your rice, grains, pasta, dried mushrooms from the summer forage, or any other item you are preparing that needs to be reconstituted for a bit of extra flavor. Making brown rice at 1 cup rice to 2 cups water? Make that 1 cup water and 1 cup stock, or even 2 cups stock.
Sautéing or frying vegetables, tofu, tempeh, or any other yummy? Use the stock liquid to deglaze the pan to save and savor all those yummy caramelized bits sticking to the bottom.
Create wonderful sauces. Mushrooms are a favorite for this. Add your veggie stock to a wide pan, we use a 10 or 12 inch cast iron, bring to a simmer and add some chopped onions and garlic until they start to soften. Add your mushrooms (reconstitute separately first if they are dried), and continue cooking – add more stock as needed. When they have cooked to your desired texture, push mushrooms to side of pan and add some butter or vegan margarine to the center of the pan and the remaining stock, let it melt down, then stir in some flour until the stock thickens to your desired thickness. Fold the mushrooms back into the thickened stock, salt and pepper to taste (I recommend going heavier on the black pepper for mushroom sauce), and serve. This past week, we ate this type of mushroom sauce over some boiled kasha (buckwheat groats), with roasted Brussel sprouts alongside, for a perfect one bowl dinner.
And the main raison d’être for my stock making – to build beautiful soups and stews.
Building beautiful soups and stews is the culmination of a kitchen and landscape process that fits our ecological lifestyle goals like a glove. Ancestors certainly would have understood this. However, soup from a can was even sometimes a thing in our Polish/Italian home for convenience sake, though it was never confused with the real thing. Point being, technological convenience is so endemic to current culture that it infiltrates everywhere as easily under your nose as the making of your veggie stock. Thus requiring a focused and intentional practice of wisdom and experience through certain physical and mental movements that the convenience of technology has rid our lives of.
An invitation to rediscover your own movements along this journey together. Physical movements such as stacking wood, digging holes, and reaching your arms overhead for harvesting. Mental movements such as frugality, creativity of planning with the expectation of failure, and slowness. I hope you have enjoyed this introductory post to the Biophilic Education & Guide Resources for a Long Reckoning series (Version: Zone 5b, Urban, Finger Lakes Bioregion, Onondaga Lake>Seneca River>Lake Ontario Watershed ) and will consider becoming a supporter at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/FrankCetera to receive quarterly transmissions for $12 per year, with 25% of revenue being donated to The Alchemical Nursery Project, and another 25% being donated to local mutual aid needs.
