Even after I had been cooking seriously for a few years, it took me a while to come around to making my own vegetable broth.
There is nothing complicated about making vegetable broth. Now that I regularly make my own broth I always have vegetable bits in my freezer; I save all of my onion skins, carrot peels, and garlic skins in a freezer bag or tupperware. Once I started making broth on my own broth, I realized that there are important benefits to this simple task. First, homemade vegetable broth is far superior to the store bought boxes, which are about $5 a carton at my grocery store. The flavor is deeper and more complex, and the broth is clear and more like a consommé than the murky store-bought broths. Second, it makes you feel a bit better about making the most out of your vegetable trimmings. Third, if you are in the right mindset, you can glean a lesson or two from the vegetable broth.
The metaphor is a blunt one; taking the seemingly worthless bits of the cooking process, and turning them into something of value... a product bigger than the sum of its parts. A generous interpretation of the metaphor might claim that the same is true of life experiences; that the gnarly, nubby lessons that seemed worthless at first might play an important role later on in life.
There is nothing complicated about making vegetable broth. Now that I regularly make my own broth I always have vegetable bits in my freezer; I save all of my onion skins, carrot peels, and garlic skins in a freezer bag or tupperware. Once I started making broth on my own broth, I realized that there are important benefits to this simple task. First, homemade vegetable broth is far superior to the store bought boxes, which are about $5 a carton at my grocery store. The flavor is deeper and more complex, and the broth is clear and more like a consommé than the murky store-bought broths. Second, it makes you feel a bit better about making the most out of your vegetable trimmings. Third, if you are in the right mindset, you can glean a lesson or two from the vegetable broth.
The metaphor is a blunt one; taking the seemingly worthless bits of the cooking process, and turning them into something of value... a product bigger than the sum of its parts. A generous interpretation of the metaphor might claim that the same is true of life experiences; that the gnarly, nubby lessons that seemed worthless at first might play an important role later on in life.
If you don't buy or grow organic vegetables, think about which skins/ends you want to use. The nice thing about peeling vegetables that have been exposed to pesticide is that you know you're not eating the out layer. So consider how you feel about those issues before using non-organic onion or other peels.
