Homemade Vegetable Stock

Fill a large pot halfway with a variety of vegetable scraps (like mentioned in the above tip) - but don’t use moldy, rotten, or soft veggies; use clean fresh pieces for the best most nutritious stock!

Good vegetable stock ingredients can be cooking scraps: celery, carrot, onion, asparagus ends, mushroom stems (cook the caps, stock the stems!), green onions, tomatoes, parsnips, garlic, leeks, scallions, and lots of herbs! (Herbs like parsley, thyme, basil, bay, peppercorns, & more.)

When the pot is half-full with veggies, fill to the top with filtered water (tap water is fine, but heavy metals get reduced just like vegetable minerals do, so filtered water is best). Simmer (barely a boil) on the stove until liquid is reduced to a good flavor and the vegetables are pale and breaking down. Strain with mesh strainer or colander, fill clean glass jars, date and label the jar with all your ingredients so you don’t forget!

You could buy and use whole fresh vegetables to make a stock - but to reduce cost and food waste, I think it’s better to make your stock from cooking scraps. It’s so easy to save up scraps for stock, while still composting the pieces you can’t save. Vegetables that don’t work well in vegetable stock: starchy veggies like potatoes, squash (including zucchini and yellow squash), green beans, turnips, and beets.
Use vegetable stock in place of water when cooking soup, stew, cooking rice or noodles, or even a warm cup to sip on in the evening- to add extra nutrition into your everyday cooking!