Broth Blocks

Part of home cooking is learning how to use everything to minimize waste and unnecessary expenses. This means making good use of leftovers, to be sure. But beyond that, it also means treating scraps and broths as precious ingredients for a future meal.

Blocks of frozen broth in the shapes of their containers start to thaw in a soup pot.

We will often have cooking liquids, soaking liquids, and broths left after cooking vegetables, reconstituting dried tomatoes, or poaching poultry or other meats. Each time we do, we pour the leftover liquids into a container and freeze them. We try our best to label them, but are not as vigilant as we should be about that. We are, however, getting better at avoiding the dreaded UFOs (unidentified frozen objects).

On Friday we decided that we should make a pot of soup over the weekend, so Ken and I rummaged through the freezer to find broths. We found a couple containers of Swiss chard broth, celery broth, pork and collard green broth, spinach broth, lentil broth and lentils, liquid from soaking dried tomatoes, and carrot and turnip trimmings (from making "turned vegetables") that had been blanched and frozen.

All the broths went into a pot to thaw and cook as a base for soup. We'll see what else gets added later. We got a lot of little things out of the freezer. Of course, there will be leftovers of the new soup to go back into the freezer, but not so much.