In this day and age, (with COVID-19) are you thinking about doing more self-sufficient cooking? Here’s some tips to help you get through leaner times.
Stock is your survival tool.
Make and use Stock. Stock is just food flavoured water. It’s super simple to make and incredibly versatile for adding flavour. It makes a great substitute for water in almost all recipes. I am a huge advocate for adding 1 cup of stock for boiling potatoes or rice, to enhance the flavour. A ton of recipes call for it and unless you have a good low FODMAP source, you need to be making it yourself. And lets not forget it’s the basis for almost all soups. Soup is the cheapest, most filling thing you can make on a budget.
Why is Soup the cheapest thing to make? Water is free, stock is mostly free. The most expensive part of it is the heating of it. To make stock you literally just need to add all of your vegetable scraps to a bag…just keep it refrigerated, or store in the freezer, and keep adding more to it. You peel a vegetable? Those peels go in your stock bag. Cut off the top of a carrot, celery, or parsnip? Put it in the stock bag. You have vegetables that are old but you don’t want to eat them? …cut them up and put in the stock bag. Bones from tonight’s low FODMAP dinner? Put them in your stock bag.
When you need a batch of stock, check the contents of the stock bag. Then in a large pot add veggies from the scrap bag and add water to cover ingredients (one or 2 liters of water, 1 or 2 tsp of salt, a teaspoon of black pepper corns, 1 teaspoon of thyme. Bring to a boil, skim off and discard any top foam, turn heat to low and simmer a few hours uncovered (2-4 hours). Taste for salt. Simmer longer for improved flavour. Strain and discard the solid ingredients. Keeps 3 days in fridge and freezes well.
This means of course to still obey FODMAP rules, so watch your quantities (i.e. Celery). Everything will boil down so don’t worry about ‘germs.’ If you are low on money this really is something you can do to stretch out your food dollars. Once you have stock, you can make soup, and just add some extra spices, chopped fresh herbs and vegetables and you are good to go. Super easy and super in-expensive.
Here our some of our recipes for stock: