>>hi avivah! do you save vegetable scraps- peels, etc- for making soup stock? why or why not? thanks!<<

Since I’m a long term frugalista, I suppose I should tell you that not only do I make stock with vegetable scraps, but so should you!  Actually, this has never been something that I’ve chosen to do.  I have several reasons.

Firstly,  I prefer to use bone broths as my stock of choice for flavor and nutritional value.  I’ve cultivated a free source of bones for broth making, so bone broths literally cost me nothing to make, plus I get the meat from the bones to use in other dishes and the fat that I skim from the top to cook with as a nice side benefit.

There’s also a limit to how much broth I can make and use in the course of a week – I generally make between 1 – 2 pots of broth each week in a sixteen quart pot (generally two in the winter, one in the summer).  So let’s say each pot amounts to about ten or twelve quarts.  That’s between 40-96 cups of broth a week, which is a lot, even for a family of eleven!  I like that bone broths have a protein sparing effect and can be used in inexpensive vegetarian dishes to significantly increase the nutrient value of a dish.  I think they taste amazing, too! (We recently sent several meals to neighbors/friends, and they kept commenting on how delicious the soups were – the only secret was that I use broth instead of water. 🙂 )  So if I have to choose between vegetable broths or bone broths, bone broths are hands down more worthwhile in every way for me.

Next, what kind of vegetables are you getting the scraps from and why?  If the veggies are in good condition, then I don’t peel them so there aren’t many scraps; I include them with the peels in the dish I’m making.  I don’t like to sound finicky or spoiled, because I’m really not, but if the peels are from produce that is starting to spoil, then I have no desire to eat them in any form.  You might wonder about  the tops or bottoms of different vegetables that are cut off, but since  I would only use vegetable scraps if they had been washed and cleaned as well as any of the other vegetables I eat, I’m not willing to do the extra work necessary.  Call me lazy, but washing onion onion skins, beet peels, potato peels, rutabaga peels, etc isn’t where I want to spend my time.  And I’d rather save my onion bottoms to plant in the spring than put them into my stock pot.

Also, I don’t generally buy organic produce, except when I can buy it at a competitive price.  So if the vegetable is fresh and the peel is clean, but I’m still choosing to peel them, it’s often because it’s my little effort in reducing some of the pesticide consumption for our family, since the pesticides generally are most highly concentrated in the outer layers.  I acknowledge that it would be better if all my produce were organic but it’s not in the budget right now, and concentrating those pesticides further by making stock with the scraps doesn’t bring me closer to my goal of better health for my family.

However, that doesn’t mean that my vegetable scraps go to waste!  I compost a huge percentage of our vegetable scraps so they end up benefiting us by boosting our soil quality.  I don’t use pesticides when I garden, and strong soil health is very important in preventing insect infestations and having high quality vegetables.  We don’t buy organic fertilizers or compost; our compost all comes from our kitchen food scraps!  So they don’t go to waste and end up saving us money in a different way.

For those who enjoy transforming their vegetable scraps into broth, terrific!  So much of frugality is personal preference; there are things that I do that would be out of someone else’s comfort zone, and things they do that are outside of mine.  The main thing is to find ways that we can each work within our budgets in a way that is satisfying and productive.

Avivah