Stone stock

Anyone over the age of 40 years and maybe some under may know the story of Stone Soup. 

My memory without Googling it — an Eastern European soldier comes into a village at a time when food is scarce and offers to make stone soup.  He puts a stone in a big pot of boiling water and suggests to various villagers that a few parsnips (or whatever) and other vegetables would really enhance the soup. The villagers all contribute what little they had and a communal feast ensued. Below is my version of that. 

Recently I had the privilege to do a series of cooking demonstrations with a real chef at the Kaiser Permanente Fremont farmers' market as part of a Senior Nutrition fair.  One of his tips was to save all the scraps from whatever vegetable you were preparing for meals — the tops of scallions, onion skins, the woody stalks of parsley, carrot tops, etc. 

I really got into it and saved leftover basil, lettuce, spinach — everything.  I just put it in a 2 gallon and a 1-gallon freezer bag and froze it.  It morphed magically into the best vegetable stock which I used to make a spectacular Mexican vegetable soup with avocado, cilantro, and lime — a recipe to follow another time. 

Now it's just the time to take stock. The soup made from this stock was simply the best. Making stock like this over time will sort out those people who feel that the vegetable scraps used need to "go with" the ultimate soup to be made.  There will be others, like me, who just make the stock with whatever is at hand and do not worry about the details.  Let me know if you have an opinion.