The Kitchen Scraps Worth Saving Now For Homemade Meals Later

Limiting food waste is an essential practice that's environmentally conscious and can help stretch your food budget further. Though something of an inevitability in cooking, kitchen scraps don't have to go straight to the trash or compost pile. In fact, there is a wonderful way to use up your vegetable scraps, stalks, scraps, and more. Whether peels, stems, stalks, or leaves, all of these can be worth saving and reusing, and will add even more flavor and nutrition to stocks, soups, stews, and a number of other dishes.

Aromatics such as garlic and onions are ideal for enhancing a basic broth, and even the paper-like skins from these alliums are worth saving to give your soup more flavor. When using carrots and other veggies, remember to wash them before peeling them for the most useful scraps. Keep flavor in mind when selecting which scraps to save and those to skip to ensure that these leftover snips, peels, stems, and ends will enhance your broth and not give it an unpleasant taste.

While plenty of scraps are worth saving, you can forgo the use of cruciferous vegetables such as kale or cauliflower stems, which can turn a broth bitter. You can also skip the potato skins. Though you can easily fry them up as a swap for typical tortilla chips in your next plate of nachos, you shouldn't use white potato peels in broths, as these can make it look cloudy.

One thing to keep in mind when saving these kitchen scraps is to make it a habit. Whenever you're preparing vegetables for any homemade dish, remember that the scraps are worth saving. Set aside a sealable plastic freezer bag or another dedicated freezer-friendly container — or several — for your specific scraps and be sure to label everything clearly for later use. Mix like vegetables together and keep in mind what recipes they'd be ideal for enhancing, or separate the vegetables to focus on specific flavor profiles. 

For example, if you're planning to prepare a chicken broth, store these vegetable kitchen scraps along with your chicken carcass or bones to simmer together. With proper storage, these can last around six months in the freezer. Mix these into a mushroom broth with herbs for a boost to the umami-rich flavor profile that will make an excellent base for soups, stews, and more. This is also great for cooking pasta or rice to add more delightful taste to the dish and infuse it with extra nutrients.

It's easy enough to take your scraps straight from the freezer and into your pot; however, some methods recommend letting the veggies thaw first. Streamline this process by adding your scraps to a pressure cooker with cold water and letting your appliance do the heavy lifting. For an even richer broth, consider roasting the thawed vegetable scraps, which will also darken the color of your broth.