My Mutant Kitchen #3 – Garbage Soup whit Serena

Hey there! My name’s Serena and when I’m not tendin the flower fields for honey collection, I help cook here on Thea’s farm. I heard y’all were lookin for some easy recipes, so let me give you one of my big tips. I call it “Garbage Soup.”

It’s not really made of garbage, but it woulda been if you weren’t paying attention. Here’s the trick. The goal is to throw nothing out. Nothing ya hear me?

Any time you cut veggies for a dish, save them. Leaves and ends of celery? Save it. Tops of carrots? Save them. Onion paper and cut roots? Save it too. Mushroom stems, old hunks of ginger, garlic peelings, literally anything.

Take all this garbage and shove it in a bag when you are done. Put it in the freezer and save it for later. Keep savin it every time you cook.

Cookin meat? Save that too. If it’s got bones, save em. Fat got cut off? Save it. Any meat you’d throw in the trash, save it and freeze it. Don’t go savin any giblets or anything like that but bones, meat shavings, fat trimmings, all are good for this recipe.

Any leftovers from fresh herbs are good too, like the stems of basil and parsley. Just put em all in a bag and when that bag fills up, it’s soup time.

Well technically we aren’t makin soup. We are makin broth.

Get a big pot and throw all your garbage in it. Then cover it up with water. Then, and this is important, you gotta add salt, some form of milk or cream, and some form of acid like vinegar, lemon juice or wine. Stir it all in and let it boil for a long time. I’m talkin most of the day or overnight if you can. If ya got a pressure cooker you can do it in a couple of hours, makes things quicker, but otherwise just let it go low and slow.

The acid will curdle the milk or cream a bit, but you want that to happen. You see, what you’re doin is leeching all the flavor from the meat and bones and veggies into the water and making a real rich stock concentrate. Thing is, some of your garbage will have some pretty bitter flavors in it that we don’t want. Luckily enough, the curdled milk pulls double duty. All the nasty bitter stuff attaches to the curdles and what’s leftover makes the stock creamy!

So now you get a strainer and put it over another pot. Strain out all the garbage and milk curdles and what’s left is going to be an insanely creamy savory stock! You can now use it in whatever you want. Make soup out of it. Use it to braise meats. You’d be payin a pretty penny for stock this good at the store, and here ya made it out of garbage. Just keep doing this every time your plastic bag of garbage in your freezer fills up and you’ll end up with a unique tasting stock each time. It’s my favorite way to save money and it goes a long way toward feeding a big family like we got here down at the farm!