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Introducing Thrifty Thursdays with Food Shift! (Video)

Stop Food Waste Blog

Introducing Thrifty Thursdays with Food Shift! (Video)

Mar 03, 2021

Stop Food Waste Blog

StopWaste is thrilled to team up with Food Shift to bring you food waste reduction tips, stories and cooking demonstrations.

Food Shift develops practical solutions to reduce wasted food, feed communities, and provide jobs. Thrifty Thursdays is a post series dedicated to food waste reduction with a justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) lens. 

Why “thrifty?” Curbing food waste is good for the earth and our wallets! Reducing food waste is an important act of environmental stewardship, and it’s also a simple way to stretch one’s grocery budget. 

When we toss out food, we toss out the energy and resources that went into its production—and all the money we spent on it.

  • On average, each American wastes 219 pounds of food a year, according to the NRDC.
  • That translates to $1600 worth of food that an American family throws out annually. 

Learn to make the most of your groceries, catch Thrifty Thursdays posts every other week on Facebook and Instagram to pick up food waste reduction tips to support your journey towards environmental and financial sustainability. To start, dive into Food Shift Culinary Director Jen Franco’s video demonstrating how to turn veggie scraps into delicious broth.

From the Food Shift Kitchen: How to Make Vegetable Broth Using Scraps

Broth can be made with most vegetable peels, tops, ends and stems. Save your useful scraps in a quart mason jar or bag and store in the freezer. Once it’s full, it’s time to make a new batch of broth. 

Ingredients:

  • 3-4 cups (or more) vegetable trimmings: carrot peels and tops, celery ends, onion ends and skin, potato peels, herb leaves and stems, garlic skins, mushroom stems. Wilted vegetables work just fine too. 
  • 3 quarts water 
  • 10 – 12 whole peppercorns (optional)
  • 2 bay leaves (optional)

Instructions:

  1. Place all ingredients in a large pot.
  2. Bring the water up almost to a boil and then reduce heat to a simmer. Simmer uncovered for 30 minutes to 1 hour. 
  3. Strain out solids through a fine-mesh strainer and discard in the compost bucket. 
  4. Use broth immediately or cool and store in the refrigerator for up to 1 week or in the freezer for up to 1 year. (If you are going to freeze your broth, leave some space at the top of your storage container because the liquid will expand as it freezes.)

Learn more about Food Shift and their programs to rescue surplus food that would otherwise waste away in landfills and utilize it to fuel their social enterprise kitchen. Follow Food Shift on Facebook and Instagram.