Welcome to day 19 of the UW Bothell Earth Month Sustainability Challenge!
Each day of April you can expect a blog post with the day’s challenge, as well as some background information, optional additional reading to expand your knowledge, resources, and updates on other events brought to you by the UWB Sustainability Office.
Today’s challenge is: Use your compost to make vegetable broth!
What do you do with your vegetable scraps? Hopefully you compost them, but don’t waste them! These tasty scraps still have a lot of flavor, nutrition, and value, so don’t throw them away just yet!
The idea is simple, save your veggie scraps when you are chopping and cooking, put them in a freezer bag in your freezer, and when you have enough, use them to make easy and delicious vegetable stock. There is an endless supply of veggie scraps from onion roots and skins, to carrot tops, garlic skin, herb stems, etc, the list is as endless as the list of stuff you’ve chopped. It’s easy to throw these scraps out, but you would be wasting all the potential that they hold!
If you start saving all these random scraps in the freezer, before long you will have enough to make vegetable stock! Not to mention that you can be more cost efficient by using up all your vegetables, including the ones that maybe got lost in the back of the fridge a little too long. Instead of throwing out wilted veggies, save them for stock!
Follow the recipe below once you have saved enough veggies (remember to avoid bitter or cruciferous vegetables like brussel sprouts, cabbage, kale, broccoli, or cauliflower:
To make a vegetable stock, place the contents of your freezer bag or whichever vegetables scraps in whatever ratios you’ve chosen in a pot, add a bay leaf if you want, cover everything with water, bring the water to a boil, reduce it to a simmer, and let it all cook for 10 minutes, and no longer. Strain it immediately through a fine-mesh strainer, ideally lined with some cheesecloth.
Additional Reading:
Get involved with Earth Month. Check out our website to find out more information about events, this year’s theme, and our Sustainability Action Plan!
Upcoming Earth Month Events:
Thank you for participating,
UW Bothell Sustainability Office 
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