Soup Stock

toadstool

I am not a cook but when I have read posts about y'all soup stock it sounds yummy. Anyone have good instructions for me(I need a cooking for dummies intro to this) on how to make the stock and then... what do I do with it to make soup?

SuperGreen

Any cookbook should have a recipe for how to make stock.  We don't eat meat so I can only help with vegetable stock, this recipe is from The Joy of Cooking.  We save all our quality veggie scraps, like pepper and onion tops/bottoms, extra mushrooms, and leftover stems in a bag in the freezer.  Anything past its prime gets composted, you don't want sour stock.  One the big freezer bag is full, we defrost it in the fridge.  We add that and enough water to cover in our dutch oven and simmer for about 2 hours, or until the veggies are reduced to mush.  We then strain that through cheesecloth until nothing sticks to the cloth, i.e., there's only liquid left.  Then we freeze it in quart-sized canning jars you can buy at the grocery store.  When a soup recipe calls for "one quart veggie stock", we defrost the stock and use it instead of store-bought stock.  Pretty much every soup recipe calls for stock.

toadstool

Cool, thanks!