— Bill Schrier

So this is great, you know, um, I try to utilize my vegetable scraps as much as possible. I do put a fair amount into the compost for the garden, but um, you know, in the winter months I don't do that as much 'cause it's just gonna freeze as I put it out there. So when I'm making scraps or when I'm making soup and I'm, um, you know, I'm still have a lot of different scraps that aren't going to go on my stocks for that wintertime, you know, soup season. Um, a lot of times what I'll do is I'll save the extra vegetables and I'll dehydrate them, um, or I'll put them, um, you know, I'll either use a dehydrator, I'll put them in an oven sheet and just put it at very low heat and basically get all the moisture out of those vegetables. Then um, you know, usually I'll cut 'em up in s small pieces beforehand. Um, and you can use 'em for a variety of different things after you've done that. Um, so a lot of times I'll put them into like a ramen and I'll sprinkle over the top some of the vegetables that I've dehydrated, um, or put them just as an addition to a top of a soup as well. Basically what it does is it's kind of like a big pop of different flavors that you typically wouldn't have in those, and especially if you're using vegetables that you wouldn't put into a stock that could, uh, work really well for something like that, something that's a little bit more potent or a little more, um, aromatic would work great for doing things like that. And I'm thinking along the lines of beets or parsnips or other things like that that are really big kind of flavors that if you used inside of a stock would be too much. But if you're just getting a little bit of a bite of it as you put it into the top of a soup for kind of a little bit of texture and a little bit of um, you know, pops of flavor, it works really, really well for something like that. Now, of course you can do the same thing and use those same things and other things like, you know, vegetable burgers or something like that too, where if you're doing like a bean or a lentil mix or something like that, you can put some of these vegetables into those too just for a little, um, extra texture, a little bit of extra flavor pops. Um, and, and through those. But more than, um, more often than not I'm going to just dehydrate them and put them on the top of a soup. Um, and of course you can use 'em in a variety of different methods as well too.