Use, don't waste

Monday, October 06, 2008

Posted by Petra Hildebrandt

What do you do with your veggie scraps? If you don't have a chance to compost them (and thus have organic matter add to the fertility of your soil), don't throw it away!

I keep a huge plastic freezer bag in my freezer, where I collect and save the peel and top ends of carrot, onion tops, the hard outer leaves of fennel or tough celery bits, mushroom stems, cilantro stems, ginger peels, kohlrabi leaves, chicken carcasses, bones from chicken wings or roast duck... when the bag is full I pop all these ingredients into a huge stockpot, adding maybe a few spices and a lot of water - and simmer away, until I have the finest, tastiest leftovers stock you can imagine.

Or what about radish leaves? It didn't dawn upon me that the leaves of tiny red radishes are actually edible (and nutritious) until I found a lovely recipe for a

Potato and Radish Soup


You'll need

350 g potatoes, preferably floury potatoes
100 g carrots
1 yellow onion
1 clove of garlic
30 g butter
600 ml vegetable or chicken stock
250 ml single cream
1 bunch of red radishes, with the greens
2 containers garden cress, snipped
salt
pepper, white if you have
nutmeg, frshly grated


Wash and peel the potatoes, scrub the carrots, peel the onion. Chop the veggies and add the minced garlic.

Heat the butter in a saucepan. Sauté the veggies until the onions are translucent, then add cream and stock an dbring to a boil. Cook, covered, for 15 minutes.

Wash the radish greens and spin them dry. Put aside 5 leaves, chop the remaining greens. For the soup you'll need 6 medium-large radishes, just feed the remaining ones to your family fresh and raw :-) .

Cut the radishes and the 6 leaves into julienne.

Now is the time to blend the soup, either in a blender or better with an immersion blender. Add the chopped radish leaves and the cress from 1 of the 2 containers, blend again. Taste for salt and pepper and season with nutmeg.

Ladle soup into bowls, garnish with radish julienne and leaves and the remaining garden cress.

A handful of sourdough bread croutons, or a slice of your favorite wholegrain bread will round out this delicious meal.


I can tell you I wont be wasting perfectly fine organic radish leaves in the future! - Enjoy!






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This Post was written by Petra from FoodFreak in Hamburg, Germany


3 comments:

That sounds delicious, Petra!
I do make my own soup stock from time to time. A good idea is to fill it into icecube bags - whenever you need just a small quantity of stock, you can pop out one or two instead of having to rewarm the entire jar!

;)

October 6, 2008 at 9:56:00 AM GMT+2  

Petra - these are a few cool tips. I am a freezer - what I mean is I freeze a lot of things. But it would never have occurred to me to freeze my peels! I love you for this tip!

Meeta K. Wolff said...
October 8, 2008 at 1:36:00 PM GMT+2  

I wouldn't have thought to freeze peel and then make stock with it.

Also we've just grown some radishes, We've composted lots of the leaves and now I want them back. We've still got quite a few left in the ground so we'll be making soup with the leaves.

Brilliant!

October 12, 2008 at 10:32:00 AM GMT+2  

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