Scrap soup and composting

Haim has always loved to cook with chicken soup powder. It is how him mom taught him to enhance many foods' flavor, and it does work....none the less, his preferred brand has plenty of junk and MSG...and I don't really like the idea of having it in our food...which otherwise is pretty much all very healthy and home made (with the exception of butterscotch chips, which I'm working on).

When we moved into our new house the first 2 things we did were order our recycling bin from the city and get our compost pile started. Both of these were pretty simple...the order required about 10 seconds on the city website and the compost required choosing a location, raking some leaves up and starting to save our non-meat kitchen scraps to dump daily on the pile. Of course, composting can (and probably should) be a bit more complex, but that was a good basic start...over the next couple of weeks, Haim built a better bin, covered and turned the compost, ect, and is now hunting our local curb sides for an appropriate barrel so that we can have easily turned compost. (On a side note, we have had A LOT of really great curbside trash finds since moving in... great scrap wood for his construction projects and even the makings of a solar box)

I guess one of the points of this wordy ramble is that it's not at all hard to start doing little things that can make a big difference. I was shocked how much food waste we would otherwise have been filling our land fill with...and I'm only cooking for 3! Equally shocking was how good the curbside trash pickings in the area were....easily saving us $200+ that we would have otherwise spent at Home Depot!

Lastly, as I was tossing things into the compost bag, I realized I was tossing a lot of scraps that would be a great base for soup stock...carrot tops and peelings, potato eyes, onion peelings (but not the papery ones), funky bits of tomato, ect...so I started saving all of my soup-type raw veggie scraps in a gallon bag in the freezer. On Friday mornings, when I'm in the kitchen for most of the morning anyway, if I have a full freezer bag I put the contents in a pot, cover it with water, and boil away...maybe adding a bay leaf and some extra garlic cloves. After a while...maybe 40-50 minutes I strain out the veggies and return the scrap stock back to the pot, where I reduce it until it is very concentrated. I let it cool and place it in a small jar in the freezer...when Haim wants his powdered stock, I can direct him to a healthy homemade and free alternative (considering that it is primarily made from refuse). I soak the jar in some hot water to loosen the frozen liquid a bit, and we scoop a spoonful into whatever is being cooked.

These little things don't really make a lot of extra work for us, but do contribute to our household economy, healthy eating, and cut down on the trash we are contributing to our landfills!