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making the most of
September 6, 2012
We eat a lot of cruciferous vegetables here in the jodi’s weblog household, and our little freezer fills up quickly with all of the stems of broccoli and cauliflower that I can’t bear to throw away, and the stubby little middles of carrots whose sweet outer layer I’ve grated into something or other. These scraps used to go into the stock pot to make vegetable broth, but ever since I discovered this lovely vegetable bouillon recipe there has been little need for stock around here. The bouillon packs a lot more flavour and takes up considerably less of our precious freezer space (I’m constantly “suggesting” to Peter that we invest in a tiny deep freeze, but for now we’re just using the little fridge-top one). So, what to do with all those frozen vegetable bits now that they’re being evicted from the freezer by a giant hoard of roasted tomatoes?
Broccoli soup.
I started with a chopped onion fried in a giant amount of butter mixed with olive oil, then threw in three stalks of fresh broccoli, stems and all (peeling the stems first). Then in went the contents of all of those bags, probably at least twenty whole broccoli stems (unpeeled, but freezing and thawing seems to make the stems less woody, so I didn’t worry about it too much), maybe six heads’ worth of cauliflower stems, and a handful of carrot bits and ends. All this was allowed to cook down a bit with a lid on for half an hour or so, then a couple of generous dollops of that frozen bouillon, some freshly ground black pepper and enough water to boil it all went in and it simmered for another half an hour. Then it all went through a blender (I had to add some water to get it all to blend nicely) and pressed through a colander (the only tedious part), and back into the pot to warm it all back up before eating. After straining, there was very little woody material left behind from the frozen broccoli, but the soup was perfectly creamy and smooth.
We served it with a little mound of brown rice, topped with dry toasted slivered almonds.
There was enough soup to put a litre and a half into the freezer as well as a litre into the fridge for leftovers. Considering how much more freezer space the stock would have demanded (10+ large yogourt tubs vs. two 750ml jars) I patted myself on the back afterwards like I’d performed some kind of incredibly clever magic trick.
Posted by jodi on September 6, 2012 at 10.57am
Categories: mama's in the kitchen