17 Jun
Vesica blog

How To Make Vegetable Broth From Kitchen Scraps

When it comes to waste in the kitchen, reducing and reusing is the name of the game. Reducing packaging, reducing plastic appliances, reducing and reusing plastic, reducing food waste, reducing toxins. 

But sometimes the amount of food waste you produce can sometimes feel unavoidable. You are often left with what seems like a neverending pile of peels, inedible skins, nasty tasting stalks and hard roots and ends, all of which end up in our rubbish bins. 

Did you know that organic material buried in landfills causes over 3% of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions annually?

There are so many great ways to reduce plastic packaging, but you might be wondering ‘what can I do with my food waste?’. 

Even when cooking simple, nourishing meals the number of food scraps produced can quickly build up. A great way to target this is to make a vegetable broth from kitchen scraps. Making your own provides a hearty winter warmer, reduces your need to buy pre-produced broth and offers you a powerful blend of vitamins and minerals. 

Aside from the packaging that store-bought broths come in, these are also known to contain a high level of salt, toxic preservatives and nasty msg’s so a homemade broth is a great way to give you and your family’s immune system, and overall health, a boost during the colder winter months. 

The great thing about this broth is that there really are no rules. Collect any and all food scraps you produce throughout the week and place them in a jar or container in your fridge. 

Veggies that work really well include potato peel, the roots and peels of carrots, onion skin and roots, broccoli stems, celery leaves, pumpkin skin, and any herbs or veggies in your kitchen cupboard or fridge which are starting to look sad (don’t use if it’s mouldy though). Get creative, and experiment with flavours, by chucking anything you have in the pot and simply boiling it up!

This broth is great to use as a base for soups, stews, risotto and sauces. Just store in a clean jar or container in your fridge or freezer and pop it in your recipes throughout the week. Your boiled scraps can then be added to your compost bin. Happy cooking!

Ingredients:

4 cups of food scraps

12-14 cups of water

A handful of any wilting herbs you have in the fridge (rosemary, thyme and parsley are great for this), or dried to supplement 

 3 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed

1 inch of fresh garlic, peeled and sliced

2 bay leaves

salt to taste

Method: 

Place everything in a large stockpot including your water. Bring to the boil

Reduce heat and simmer on a low heat (covered) for 1 hour

Turn off the heat and remove vegetable chunks with a slotted spoon

Strain remaining liquid through a metal sieve. Allow to cool

Store in a jar or airtight container for up to a week, or freeze in portions

Have you tried making your own stock before? Let us know how it went!

24 Mar
Vesica blog

How to Compost for Zero Waste Living

Take out the plastic, and food is just about all that’s left in your rubbish bin. In zero waste living, your glass, paper, cardboard and metal are all commonly recycled so your scraps is all that remains.

Food waste makes up almost 40% of the typical domestic rubbish bin, including spoiled fruit and vegetables, the peels, the skins, the outer leaves, the cores, the husks, the seeds. The ‘inedible’ bits, basically.

Composting is one of the most effective ways that you can help the environment. By sending food waste to landfill, Australians are generating methane equal to around 6.8 million tonnes of carbonic acid gas. Methane is 30x more powerful than your average Co2.

Here, we show you options for composting in gardens or smaller spaces as well as environmentally-friendly ways to deal with your food scraps.

Types of Compost Bins

If you’ve got a backyard, you’ve got it pretty easy. You’ll be able to have a tumbler bin, an interior bin that stands alone, a worm bin or you have the option of trench composting.

Trench composting involves digging a minimum of a foot deep into the ground to throw your scraps in and then you bury them. Remember with this option, it’s important to make sure that you’re digging pretty deep so that animals aren’t able to dig them up.

If you reside in an apartment or inner city, there are other ways to compost, like bokashi bins and electronic composters that can be kept in your kitchen cupboard or on your counter tops.

Worm farms (also called vermicomposting) are also a good option if you only have indoor options available to you as they thrive in stable temperatures. They use composting worms, which are fast growing and fast eating, instead of earthworms that you just might collect from your garden.

Options for City and Suburban Living

A standard compost bin requires a patch of soil or dirt about 1m² so they are easy to accommodate in tiny gardens or small areas outside of your house.

Even if you don’t have your own garden, look for shared areas where might be able to put one. It might even be possible for you to borrow or share an compost bin with friendly neighbours in your local area. It doesn’t hurt to ask, and it’s an opportunity to build good relations with others in your area.

If you live in an apartment but have a balcony, a tumbler compost bin would work well as they don’t require being dug into the ground.

If you don’t have space to compost bin in your home, community gardens are an excellent place to take your waste for composting. Many accept food scraps without the necessity for you to be a member (although being a member may be a good way to support a neighborhood organisation doing good within the community). Research where the closest community garden is to your home, and get in touch to find out how you can use their bins.

Many areas are now collecting scraps within the organic waste / garden bins so it’s also worth checking with your local council about what they’re currently accepting.

Other ways to cope with veggie scraps

Food scraps can be used in a number of easy and useful ways; vegetable stalks and skins are great in homemade stock, apple cores and skins fermented down into apple cider vinegar, roots sprouted in water and planted in your veggie garden, stale bread makes the perfect croutons when roast or fried for french toast, soft fruit and veg can be used in baking, banana skins can even be used for cleaning! What you can’t, or don’t want to reuse, can then be thrown into the compost bin.

How do you deal with your food waste? Do you compost, or have a worm farm, or a bokashi? Which one is your favourite? 

24 Feb
Vesica blog

9 Essential Items to Build a Plastic Free Starter Kit

We all have the best intentions of living completely plastic-free, but then you accidentally forget to decline your plastic straw when you order your drink, you grab a coffee and realise you left your reusable coffee cup at home, or you can’t make it to the bulk store. We get it. Life happens right?

Don’t get hung up on these things, move on and make changes now so that you can avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

The first step towards change is often the hardest, but a good place to start living a life of less waste is a plastic-free kit.

A plastic-free kit is a collection of essential items which you can keep on your, or near you, at all times so that you’ll never run the risk of being without something and having to opt for the plastic version.

Perhaps you’re just starting out, or you’re looking for some inspiration on how you can reduce your impact even further, so we’ve put together 9 essential items that every good plastic-free kit needs.

Reusable Coffee Cup

Nothing tastes better than a ‘proper’ coffee from a coffee shop, made by an experienced barista. What used to be a quick pick-me-up has now become a morning ritual.

Australians throw out 2.7 million single-use or disposable coffee cups every single day. This adds up to 1 billion coffee cups thrown out every year. Can you even imagine what 1 BILLION coffee cups look like?!

Reduce the waste that you produce by grabbing yourself a reusable coffee cup. Not only do they usually look better than a paper or plastic version, they will keep your coffee warmer for longer and do good for the planet too.

Shopping Bags

Getting yourself a reusable shopping bag is one of the easiest ways that you can reduce your plastic waste.

Up to 5 trillion single-use plastic bags are used worldwide every year. These often end up in our oceans and are often consumed by turtles mistaking them for jellyfish, or by whales.

We love an insulated shopping bags to keep our veggies fresh and frozen food frozen for longer.

Tea Leaf Strainer

If you’re anything like us and average upwards of 5 cups of tea each per day, every day then over the course of a year you’ll be sending over 2,000 tea bags to landfills. The numbers are shocking when you think about it!

Teabags are made from a very fine plastic that realised particles into your tea, and our water stream. To reduce your impact swap your tea bags for tea leaves in a metal strainer instead.

Loose tea leaves are often better quality too, so it’s a win-win.

Water Bottle

More than 60 million plastic bottles end up in landfills and incinerators every day. Six times as many plastic water bottles were thrown away in the US in 2004 as in 1997. Plastic waste is one of many types of wastes that take too long to decompose.

Normally, plastic items can take up to 1,000 years to decompose in landfills so add a stainless steel metal water bottle to your plastic-free kit and reduce your impact on the environment.

Metal Straw

Plastic straws are not biodegradable. Most plastic straws simply break into ever-smaller particles, releasing chemicals into the soil, air, and water that are harmful to animals, plants, people, and the environment.

Fortunately, saying no to plastic straws no longer leaves you with the option of a soggy paper straw. Equip yourself with a reusable straw, they are so easy to keep in your handbag so you’ll never be left without.

Zip Lock Bags/Wax Wrap

There are so many better options for eco-friendly food storage on the market than plastic.

Only recently have the wonders of honey bee products been discovered by the masses. In recent years, people are starting beehives in their backyard and now the benefits of beeswax are going mainstream as well!

They may not be a vegan option but beeswax wraps are safe for you and mother earth. They are made of 100% eco-friendly materials and can be left to compost when ready to discard.

Lunchbox

Say goodbye to pre-made sandwiches or salads in plastic boxes.

Get yourself a lunchbox that is made from natural and renewable wheat straw fibre, starch and food-grade PP instead. They are 100% environmentally friendly, BPA-free, non-toxic, renewable, degradable and food safe.

Toothbrush

It’s estimated that the average person uses 300 toothbrushes a year. That equates to billions of toothbrushes lying in landfills and oceans which never break down.

Swap your plastic toothbrush for a brush made from biodegradable natural fibres like bamboo instead.

Hairbrush

Another plastic product which can be easily swapped for natural material alternatives.

A plastic-free bamboo bristle hairbrush will look oh so pretty sat on your bathroom shelf and will also improve the condition of your hair and scalp. 

Do you have a plastic free kit? What do you keep in yours?