Start Giving A Scrap!

We’ve all been there; we get the bill for our groceries and ask ourselves, where does it all go? The food looks so good and bountiful when we put it in the cart, but somehow it never seems like enough.

The fact is, we don’t use as much of it as we could.

Here are some stats that may baffle you

In the U.S.:

  • 40% of food is wasted
  • 90% of food is thrown away too soon
  • 20% of the food we buy never gets eaten

And this isn’t just a problem in the U.S., in my home country of Canada:

  • $31 billion of food annually wasted
  • 47% of that is from consumers

So, while I’m hardly ready to pull out my guitar and starting singing kumbaya, preach extremes like backyard composting, or the 100 mile diet. I am going to start posting more recipes made from parts of the food you wouldn’t think to keep. Also, I’m going to start indicating ‘scraps’ that should be kept for future recipes.

The first of these recipes is an important one, vegetable stock. There have been a few recipes that called for it that I wanted to post, but decided not to. The reason for this is I knew I was going to write this post eventually, and it would be redundant if I already had another recipe up with the steps for veg stock in it.

So the way I make my veg stock, it cost me next to nothing. The reason for this is whenever I cut green onions, onions, celery, carrots, garlic, or chives, I always put the cut away into a plastic bag in my freezer. Likewise, when the stock is done, I pour it into ice cube  trays, freeze it, then store the cubes in zip lock bags.

That being said, I use these cubes all the time. Just about any savoury recipe that calls for water, can often be replaced with stock for a much better result.


  • Onions (Scraps or whole with skin and roots)
  • Carrots (Scraps or whole with whole with leaves)
  • Celery (Scraps or whole with leaves)
  • Water
  1. As mentioned above, I keep a bag in my freezer, and whenever I cut Onions, Celery or Carrots I put the scraps in the bag. I’ll also put in Garlic, Green Onions and Chive scraps but it isn’t necessary. As a general rule, you want the veg mixture to be a Onion, Celery and Carrot mixture of 2:1:1. So if you don’t have enough scraps for one of the veg, simply roughly chop up a fresh veg to make up the difference.
  2. Put vegetables in a big stock pot, and fill pot with water until it covers the veg.
  3. Bring stock pot up to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer.
  4. Let the water simmer until vegetables are fork tender.
  5. Strain out liquid into a bowl, and let cool. Discard Vegetable remains.
  6. Pour veg stock into ice cube trays and freeze.
  7. Transfer each cube of Vegetable stock into a plastic bag and store in the freezer.
  8. Make something awesome with the Vegetable stock. Each cube is approximately 1 Fl oz (or two table spoons).
  9. Take a fancy photo, and post it to Instagram with the hashtag #foryourfoulmouth