Saturday, July 21, 2012

Rich fragrant vegetable stock

As our wormery is in no need of peelings and our compost heaps are breaking their boundaries, I decided to hold back a couple of days vegetable peelings and make a rich stock. I'll admit to being quite generous in the celery department by not using the leaves in other meals so that they could be added to the stock, but for the rest it was just the parts not used like garlic and onion outers, tops of marrows and squash, ends of tomatoes and carrot peels. After 2 days we had a packed bowl full.


I gently browned a few cloves of garlic in some olive oil....


Then tipped the peels etc into the pot.....


And covered it with spring water....

About 1 hour later I added a huge bunch of herbs - thyme, parsley and majoram. I also added about 10 whole peppercorns.


Allowed to simmer for 3 hours, then left overnight to cool.


This morning I strained it and put it into jars for use this week and some into plastic containers to freeze for later use.


I wish I could explain the fragrance of this stock. We have been making meat stocks for a couple of years now and they have their own warming smell. But this vegetable stock had such a full bodied smell....can't wait to use it.



4 comments:

Cath said...

Yummy. I am interested that you bottle it rather than freeze it. Isn't that more work?

Linda said...

This sounds so wonderful Wendy, thanks. Have a peaceful weekend.

Urban Homestead South Africa said...

Cath, I just put my chicken and beef stock into clean bottles and keep them in the fridge as we use about 5liters a week with soup every day for lunch. I kept 1liter of veg stock in the fridge and froze the rest for later as I like the meaty flavour of the bone stock more and didn't want any of it to go off as I have about 3litres of chicken/beef to still use up. I definitely to not pressure or water bath my stocks, we use them too fast. X

Hope you give it a try, Linda it was quick to make.

Chris said...

Beautiful, Wendy! I have been pondering over making some veggie stock too..good to have on hand for when the vegetarians drop in.

(PS - I almost thought you'd written 'Womanry' up the top instead of wormery, my foggy Sunday brain not geared up for blog reading action, obviously! lol. :)