— Melissa Bryant

I love this and this is something I do every, every week. It might take me two weeks. Um, but what I do is anytime I'm cutting any scraps for vegetables, that's usually going to be onion skins. The core of a pepper, uh, could be the peelings from carrots, uh, the, the stalks, the very bottom stalks or leaves of celery, um, all kind of the scraps of things like that. I'll put all those things into a freezer bag and then put them in my freezer and when that bag fills up, I'll take it out and put it into a pot, bring, uh, you know, and fill it up with water, bring that up to a boil and then down to a simmer for about an hour. And then I have a nice vegetable stock with no sodium added to it. Now you do wanna avoid certain things that are overpowering in flavor or uh, that would change the color, right? So like beets, I wouldn't put like the, the beet greens or trimmings into um, that because it would turn your stock red. Um, uh, probably wouldn't use things like uh, garlic, you know, or um, other things like ginger 'cause it's going to really kind of overpower the entire thing. But the other vegetable trimmings are great to be able to use for that. Um, mushroom stems are great to be able to put in there too. Um, I'll, you know, often throw a couple dried shiitakes or something in the stock as well, um, just to be able to make a great umami flavor out of the stock as well too. But that's typically how I do it and if you're freezing it, you can keep it as long as you want to and I'm storming it, storing it right in the freezer as well. Um, after I do it, I basically strain it off into a ra rather large couple of um, you know, like ball jars or in, in that style of jar. And then I'll keep it in my fridge for a couple weeks and it works just fine.