Vegetable Broth

Last week, my girlfriends and I threw a Sprinkle for two of our special ladies. Most of the parties we throw are potluck to helps to cut costs for everyone. I hosted the Sprinkle in my apartment, so I wound up keeping most of the leftover food. Along with other fun snacks we had a vegetable tray and a pretzel tray. These two trays left me more food than I knew what to do with. As I have mentioned before, I hate to waste and try to avoid it at all costs. Usually my main method is freezing stuff for a later date. I didn't know how well the pretzels would fare after being frozen and thawed. I roasted some of the vegetables to have with a dinner, but there was no way I could manage to eat all the left overs before they spoiled. I am happy to report that I managed to find uses for both!! Pretzel bread crumbs and vegetable broth!

I will explain how I made the pretzel bread crumbs in a future post. Today I will share how I made the vegetable broth.

My leftover vegetables from the tray consisted of baby carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, cherry tomatoes, and cucumbers. I decided to discard the cucumbers. I also added one onion, half a bag of spinach, half a garlic bunch (is that what you call the cluster of cloves? that's what I am going with), some onion powder, dried parsley, and two bay leaves. I was nervous about using the spinach, but it would have went bad if it was not used soon.

No chopping or dicing needed! The only prep I did to the vegetables was slicing the onion in half and smashing the garlic bunch with a knife. You can even leave the skins on the onion and garlic. I put all my ingredients in my crock pot and filled it with water, making sure all the veggies were covered. Then I covered the crock pot and set it to low. It cooked for about 12 hours only because I had work then a job interview (fingers crossed!). I am sure you could cook it on low for less time. My guess 6-8 hours.

When I walked into my apartment, the smell of garlic was very overpowering. That made me so nervous to taste it! I could not expect the broth to turn out great because I had never made it before. To separate the broth from the veggies, I put a fine holed colander (strainer) in my largest pot and poured it through. I filtered it twice to be sure most of the herbs and tiny pieces were out. My nose lied! It was very delicious! It came out to be about 11 cups of broth.

Broth of any type can easily be frozen and stored later use. I separated mine into 2 cup quantities, so I wont have to thaw out more than I need when a recipe calls for broth. You can substitute vegetable broth in any recipe that calls for chicken broth and you can cook rice with it instead of water to add some extra flavor. Using it to cook rice will most likely be my first use for my homemade broth.

You can use any type of vegetable to make your broth. Whatever you have on hand, it is a great use for veggies that will go bad if not cooked.If you have leftover veggies from dinner and its not enough to save to eat as leftovers another night, maybe you want to toss them in a Ziploc bag and freeze. Continue to do this and when the bag is full make broth! Why throw food you already paid for in the trash?