Vegetable Broth Revolution!

Every Sunday is “make meals for the week” day.  In the winter, the majority of the meals involve beans, which require soaking before cooking.  I have the routine set now.  I wash the dried beans, boil, and cover them before we leave for the Ethical Society.  Occasionally, I’ll also start the bread maker.  Off we go to Ethical, and when we come home we have fresh bread made and beans ready to cook.  I spend the next 3-4 hours chopping, sautéing, and cooking, with multiple meals ready by 5 p.m.  We have a feast that night and then we box up the leftovers for instant dinners the rest of the week.  Devoting one chunk of time to cooking is so much better than a little bit each day, especially with clamoring children who start complaining about being hungry before we’ve walked into the house each evening.  I’m saner with this strategy. 

Along the way I realized all my food scraps should go somewhere more purposeful than the trash.  We composted for a few years, but the Whomptons don’t do enough yard work to manage the overwhelming amount of soil that produced.  So we stopped composting.  (I feel very guilty admitting this publicly but not guilty enough to start doing it again.)  To make up for it, I started collecting all the food scraps – all the ends from celery, carrots, and onions, and all our white and sweet potato peels – and tossing them in a big pot.  Once a week, I convert that gigantic pot of vegetable scraps into a gigantic pot of vegetable broth, which immediately gets used to support Sunday cooking.  All the new veggie scraps get saved and then become broth the next weekend. 

It’s a remarkably glorious system.  I initially thought that we’d be overrun with vegetable broth, but I manage to use it all by the next Sunday.  We’re saving money since I’m not buying 3 quarts of vegetable stock a week and I have further encouragement to make wholesome food for my family.  Happiness! 

Overall, I never imagined that I would become the person who would 1) enjoy cooking so much and 2) advocate for make-it-yourself meals.  I clearly am not the same person I was 15 years ago.