A weekend experiment

Today I decided to make vegetable stock. The idea for this has been tempting me for a few years but I've always felt it would be too much faff and time consuming. With more time at home and in need of ways to occupy myself it felt like the right time to experiment. 

One of the past deterrents of this has been the need for a significant quantity of scraps-even with a mainly plant based diet I didn't think I'd have sufficient scraps from one meal to produce a meaningful quantity of stock. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that I could freeze scraps and then attempt the stock once I had enough. Since then I have filled three plastic takeaway containers with a mixture of broccoli stalks, courgette trimmings, pepper tops, squash peelings, spring onion ends, and garlic and onion skins. Some recipes advise against using onion skin but this seemed to be more for aesthetic reasons than taste ones. As this was an experiment I didn't have anything to lose by including them.

The slow cooker was dug out from the back of the cupboard and the scraps were retrieved from the freezer. Having been worried about not having enough scraps I quickly found that two containers quickly filled the small slow cooker, so the third was returned to the freezer.

I added some dried oregano, bay leaves, peppercorns and sea salt for extra flavour. Then add enough boiling water to cover, put the lid on and leave the slow cooker to do its thing for about 4 hours (or longer). It was a welcoming smell when I returned from my Unconfined Walk.

Unfortunately the end result was rather too bitter to use. I suspect a few pepper seeds may have made their way into it, and perhaps including the onion skins was a mistake. Luckily I had a plentiful supply of stock cubes to resort to for tonight's potato, pea, and herb broth. 

In reality this was a lot more straightforward than I expected and I'm prepared to experiment again with a more judicious selections of vegetable scraps.