If you’re like me you have a lot of kitchen waste.  My house traffics in leftovers and old vegetables in particular. It’s disheartening to open your fridge and see the waste of not only food, but of money, time and energy.

So…what to do? While I don’t have many solutions for leftovers except to eat them or not make as much (I am practicing the latter…I’m coming upon a ‘make only 3 servings’ rule), I do have two solutions to get rid of your vegetable waste.

1. Compost

Veggie scraps in a 5 gallon bucket

Ah…compost.  Seeing Home Depot or other plant nurseries stacked high with sacks of compost can lead to the impression that it’s “just dirt”, but compost, my friends, can be made. And it’s not just dirt—no sirree. It’s black gold for the gardener.

Compost is what happens in nature when plant matter falls to the ground, decays and leaves a black, crumbly layer behind called humus. Humus provides nutrients for the surrounding plants and the cycle continues through each season, year after year.

Gardeners, large and small, apartment and house, can replicate this cycle with their own yard trimmings, raked leaves, earthworms and kitchen scraps. You can buy small scale (and large scale) composters or you can make your own.  Making your own with chicken wire is cheap—we just purchased 24 ft of chicken wire for $15 dollars—especially considering that some of the prefabricated ones run upwards of $100. The most important considerations in making a compost pile are: that it has plenty of oxygen,  you’ll be able to access it easily and that it doesn’t get too dry or too wet (no standing puddles, for instance).

To make compost you just collect your kitchen scraps (raw plant matter, skins, eggshells, coffee grounds and tea leaves; not meat, fats or cooked food) and take them out to the compost pile. In the pile you want to have roughly 70% brown matter (leaves, yard trimmings, brown paper bags, ash, cotton, linen, cardboard) and 30% green matter (kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, tea leaves, grass, manure).

You can also check out worm composting, especially for you apartment dwellers, but as I don’t have experience with that I won’t write about it (yet!).

…Really, that’s all there is to composting. To speed up the process you can turn the pile every day or so, pour on wine/molasses/natural cola or cover it with a tarp to let it “cook”.  In 3-4 months you’ll begin to see your compost!

2. Vegetable Broth

Pretty much everything in the fridge went into this pot...

So. Yesterday I went to the store to buy ingredients for a soup I was making for our Monday night group. I returned home and unpacked my groceries to find out—crap!—that I forgot the vegetable broth. Only the most important ingredient in the soup.

Laziness prevented me from going back to the store, but necessity had me looking for alternatives. I peered into our fridge and voilà! I had tons of cut up crudités from the weekend before (moving snacks) that were on their way south. Not rotted, mind, but just…you know, flimsy. More, I had some waning fresh herbs (thyme and bay), peppercorns, lemons and plenty of garlic and onions.

Make broth. So I threw it in the pot—skins and all—added salt and let it simmer for a few hours while I did other stuff.  Every once in a while I stopped by to taste, add salt or take out a flavor I didn’t like (celery became overwhelming—I put in a ton).  After two hours of simmering I strained the broth and done!

It worked!

Here’s what I would use in broth:

Carrots, onions, garlic, parsnips, celery, tomatoes, thyme, bay leaves, peppercorns, salt, mushrooms (for richness), fennel, leeks, cauliflower…

The best part is that it’s freezable. Even if you’re not in a bind, make the broth when you notice your vegetables going downhill and freeze it for later use.

It’s important to note that you shouldn’t use rotted or gummy vegetables, as boiling concentrates flavor and you can taste it. But when you have a full fridge of veggies you know you’re not going to get to—well, broth is a pretty logical choice!

Plus, you save money. Instead of $3 to $4 dollars for a quart I probably spent…$1/quart…and that’s with organic vegetables.

There you have it! Two ways to reduce waste and save money.