Something I have been experimenting with recently is creating vegetable stocks. For years I’ve often made meat stocks from things like the bones from chicken thighs or even what is left off I’ve picked the usable meat off the bones of a cooked dish. Stick that in the slow cooker with plenty of water and perhaps a bay leaf or two and you can get an excellent stock.

You can also make stocks from vegetables and it struck me that a lot of goodness is often in the bits that get discarded. What I’ve been experimenting with is taking things like onion skins, carrot peelings and the green bits at the end of leeks, giving them a wash to get rid of any dirt and putting that in the slow cooker.

The result is a brownish liquor (almost blood red with the red onion and carrot combination I did yesterday!) that can be condensed down with a bit of further boiling and used in further dishes. For example, I’m doing quite a few soups at the moment and the trimmings from one day’s soup can become the base for the next day’s edition. It’s frugal but also very tasty.