Broth Reconsidered

When I was much younger I though that making broth was a waste of perfectly good vegetables.  Why spend good money, or even worse, lots of gardening time to grow  onions, carrots, celery, leeks, and turnips,  only to boil them for hours then strain them out of the broth and discard?

It’s only in the last few years that I’ve come to appreciate broth as a way to use vegetables that should not be featured raw or as a  cooked side dish.

Ingredients for broth

These are the vegetables that went into the stock pot with the turkey bones:

• Leek greens. The greens are too tough to chew but they have all that good leek flavor. Scrub them well and chop across the strappy leaves.
• Celeriac greens. These are too tough and too strong-tasting to eat raw, but they are great for flavoring broth.  Use sparingly or you might have too much celery flavor.
• A woody turnip that had stayed in the garden too long. I carved away the insect damage and used the remainder.
• An onion that had sprouted. It couldn’t be stored for long.
• A yellow carrot variety whose raw flavor we don’t like.

After Thanksgiving, all the vegetables for the Turkey Soup were fresh from the garden. The vegetables for today’s broth are from my root cellar. It is wonderful to be able to gather the all vegetables needed for a meal simply by going down to the basement and ducking into the root cellar.

There is nothing like a bowl of steaming turkey-vegetable soup to warm up a winter day.