Ethical eating: reducing food waste

One of our goals as part of our attempt to eat more ethically is to reduce the amount of stuff we throw away.  This includes packaging - a goal that matches up nicely with the scratch and home cooking approach! - as well as, of course, food itself. But it also involves management of our pantry staples.

Pantry. Note: I love boxes.

Meal prepping helps with this in theory, because you know what you will need to have on hand to make the meals you intend to make. That means that we can - theoretically - check for items in the pantry before we head out to get groceries.  I keep talking about all of this "in theory" because, well, let's be honest - there are some staples that I need to have on hand regardless of whether I intend to use them in the next week.  And sometimes I am making a meal plan in the car on our way somewhere, or over text message while one of us is at work, which means I'm not right on hand to check out the pantry's contents.  (What the photo above doesn't show you is that there are currently four cans of coconut milk in my pantry, because I always wind up picking up a can or two when grocery shopping.  Is coconut milk a weird pantry staple? Do most people have three kinds of rice, barley, and farro on hand in case of some kind of grain-related emergency?)

Even in the best managed kitchen, though, a certain amount of food waste feels inevitable.  Sometimes we go "off-roading" and don't eat according to plan.  And, of course, there are those weird bits and scraps of vegetables: the tips of green beans, the base of broccoli crowns, stray bits of carrot and cauliflower.  We're in a townhome with no means of composting (FOR NOW), so we had assumed that those bits would go to waste.

And then we took a knife skills class.

At the class, we chopped lots and lots of veggies.  Unlike at most of our classes, though, we weren't using them to cook that day.  Our chef explained the fate of our meticulously chopped peppers, carrots, and more: they would be roasted to make vegetable stock.  After all, wasted food is wasted money in a professional kitchen.

And genius struck.  Could we use those bits and bobs of veggies that we were going to toss to make our own veggie stock, solving both the food waste problem and our chronic need for stock to make risotto?

Why yes, we can!  This past weekend was a stock-making weekend.  All our stray bits of veggies get tossed in a freezer-safe, reusable silicone bag.  When the bag gets full, it's stock time.

This weekend's batch had a lot of our "usual suspects" - carrots and broccoli and onion - as well as some green beans and pieces of sweet potato.  The process is simple: first, roast the veggies with olive oil, salt, and pepper to release the flavor. When I say roast, I mean over-roast.  You want to char them a bit.  I get nervous about overdoing it, so this part of the process usually involves a lot of me hollering "are they burning?" while Karen yells "I'll tell you if I smell burning!".

Once they're nicely cooked, you can dump the whole pan of roasted veggies into a stock pot and add water.  Then let them boil (and boil and boil).  Our veggies cooked for hours on Saturday evening.

Swimming veggie bits

How do you know when it's done?  We do it by color, mostly - just let them keep cooking for longer than seems reasonable.  The process at that point is simple: you'll need to strain your veggies out of the stock.  (You could compost them, if you can compost, we think.)  This is the point when the veggies do go in the trash, to our sadness.

The stock we made this time is really lovely - it is dark and looks sort of like coffee in the mason jars we've put it in.  I don't have an immediate planned use for this batch, so the jars went right into the freezer to wait until risotto (or soup or stew) time.  (Pro tip: using homemade stock means your risotto will be a slightly weird color.  It took us a long time to realize that it didn't mean we'd done it wrong: it was just because of the homemade stock.  We use purchased stock to make risotto if we're having company, so that it doesn't look wonky and unappetizing.)

I'm not sure how long it will keep frozen, honestly.  We've never tested the outer limit; we tend to cycle through it pretty quickly.  But I love that our stray scraps of veggies have yielded us with yet another five cups of delicious, delicious stock to use in future cooking, and that we extended the life of our produce just a little further.

Looks like coffee, tastes like magic