Slow Cooker Vegetables – The best way to reuse veggie scraps.

One of the benefits of making good old fashioned wholesome bone broth is that you can pretty much throw in anything you like. Slow cooker vegetables or in this case vegetable off-cuts are a great way to use what we would normally throw away.

This includes the the little bits of carrot ends you normally trim off and then give to the chooks or throw away. Even onion butts can be thrown in and used to make nutrient rich bone broth, that tastes great.

It doesn’t really matter what you put into the broth. And as the old saying goes….. When it comes to slow cooker vegetables,Waste not want not.

So instead of putting in a whole onion, you could easily just collect together all the onion off-cuts from the last few days and store them in the fridge. And when it’s time to cook up another batch of bone broth you can add them to the pot.  Simple as that.

The bone broth is generally strained after cooking so all these little off-cuts of collected veggies are never a problem.

One thing to keep in mind is to put in the veggie scraps after you have initially boiled the bone broth. This is to maximise the nutritional goodness in the vegetables, as over heating them can denature some of the nutrients.

If you are pressed for time and you just want to throw everything into the pot at the start and boil away, that’s fine also, (I’ve been known to do this). You still get that awesome veggie flavouring and most of the nutrients. However, if you really want to maximise the nutritional value of the veggie scraps, then definitely add the veggie after the first boil is finished.

I have also been known to raid the far reaches of the refridgerator vegetable draw in search of wilted or other such vegetabels that are not long off the compost bin. What ever I find, ends up in the broth goodness that I’m cooking at the time.  It doesnt matter if the long lost vegetable is not the most eye catching specimen, because after a couple of hours in the simmering batch of broth, they all taste the same.

So there you have it. Keep all those veggie scraps you would normally throw away and add them to your next batch of bone broth.