I was flicking through the Sunday Age last weekend when I came across this article on the amount of food waste that Victorians send to landfill.

The story claims that on average each household in Victoria throws out 25o kg of food matter each year, and that over 1 million tonnes of food waste is sent to landfill creating 1.6 million tonnes of greenhouse gases.

The article attributes the large scale waste to affluence and a belief amongst householders that it’s better to have a full fridge and throw out unused, rotting food than go hungry.

These claims got me thinking. Since moving from a tiny apartment with no garden to a full-blown house, we’ve invested in a worm farm and a compost bin. Separating out our food scraps and watching it pile up so quickly each week has made me very conscious of the amount of food materials that go unused. While I like to think that we use most of what we buy, if we weren’t composting the food or feeding it to our busy worms, food scraps would probably make up the biggest proportion of our household waste.

On top of the issue of people buying more food than they need, I think another factor in the large amount of food waste is that people have lost the knack, time or desire to use up excess food.

Composting and worm farms might not be for everyone, but there are some great recipes that allow you to make some use of leftovers. A good example of this is vegetable stock. Aside from using up older vegetables, you can you make a great base for soups and risottos that suits your tastes and you also get to control the amount of salt and oil that goes into it. So, inspired by the article, this is my weekend herb blogging entry for the week: vegetable stock flavoured with bay leaves.

Vegetable stock

Ingredients

2 carrots or half a sweet potato
2-3 potatoes or 4-5 baby potatoes
3 celery stalks plus leaves
1 onion, peeled
5 cloves of garlic, peeled
5 bay leaves
3 sprigs of rosemary
salt and pepper to taste

Method

Chop up all the vegetable ingredients into the same-sized pieces. The smaller the pieces the faster the water will absorb their flavours. You don’t need to peel the vegetables but you do need to wash them.

Put the vegetables in a large, heavy-based saucepan with a lid (preferably a stockpot but a big saucepan will do). Throw in the bay leaves and rosemary leaves and mix them in so that they are spread throughout the stock pot. Add 2-3 teaspoons of salt. Cover the vegetables in water so the waterline is a few cm higher than the top vegetables.

Bring to the boil, then simmer on a low heat for two hours with the lid on. Taste occasionally to test the flavour, adjusting the salt and pepper if necessary with half an hour to go.

Remove the saucepan from the heat and strain the base from the vegetables. The stock will keep for a few days in the fridge, but if you make a decent quantity it’s best to freeze it in small containers where it will last for three months.

Notes on the recipe

• The great thing about vegetable stock is that you can use whatever you have in your fridge - so use the list of ingredients as a guide only.
• The vegetables I always use in a stock are potatoes, celery, garlic and onion. These give the stock a nice, soft, salty base and don’t make the stock overly sweet or ‘vegetably’.
• Other ingredients that make a great base are leeks, carrots, fresh parsley and mushrooms.
• Adding pumpkin, corn, sweet potato and carrot will make the stock sweeter.
• Adding peppercorns to the stock will make it cloudy, so it’s best to add these at the end.
• The vegetables do make the base quite salty, so it’s best to go easy on the amount of salt you add at the start and then adjust the flavour at the end once the full flavour of the vegetables has been absorbed into the base.
• If you want a richer taste to the stock, you can saute the vegetables in butter or oil first.

Bay leaves

• Bay leaves are a staple of European cooking.
• The bay leaf comes from the laurel tree family.
• It’s most commonly used in stocks and soups, and when cooking meat. Dried bay leaves are added for their fragrance as much as their taste.
• Bay leaves are not substitutable for Asian leaves used in cooking. So-called Indian and Indonesian bay leaves are unrelated and have a distinctly different taste.

If you want to find out more, check out wikipedia and about.com.

This week’s weekend herb blogging is hosted by Ulrike at Kuchenlaten.

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