4 Kitchen Scraps You Shouldn’t Throw Away

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Turkey Broth

Make better use of your kitchen scraps, and you’ll have less trash to take out and fewer groceries to buy. Here are four scraps that are worth hanging on to:

Bones – Beef bones, ham bones, chicken bones, turkey bones – they all make beautiful broth. Just throw them in your crockpot with some veggies, herbs and water, and come back later in the day to jar it up.

Vegetable Scraps

Vegggie Scraps – Drop onion, carrot and potato peels, broccoli stems, cabbage cores and carrot tops into a freezer bag, and pop it into the freezer. When the bag is full, use it to make a rich vegetable broth.

How to Make Orange Extract

Citrus Peels – Keep orange and lemon peels for their zests, dry them to add to recipes or use them to create your own extracts.

Bread Crumbs

Bread – Save bread heels, crusts and any stale bread that you may have, and use them to make your own bread crumbs. If you dry your breadcrumbs in the oven, they’ll keep for months.

Are there other kitchen scraps that you keep? I’d love to hear what they are and what you do with them.

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9 Comments

  1. We save shellfish shells: shrimp, oyster, mussel, and scallop. We store them in the freezer and make seafood broth that we use to make delicious clam chowder.

    We also keep fat from cooking meat and freeze it to use to make gravies for special dinners.

    I give my eggshells to a friend who uses them as fertilizer in her garden.

    coffee grounds are good for scrubbing pans too.

    1. Oooh … those are excellent examples. Like you, we also save our egg shells. I use them to fertilize our tomatoes and other calcium-loving plants.

  2. Coffee rounds are good to save for the garden. I have been to starbucks on a few occasions. I have seen people pick up large clear garbage bags of used grounds from them. Also tea leaves are great to to fertilize the soil.

  3. We generally compost fruit and vegetable scraps, but there are a few things we like as “repeats”. Apple peel jelly, watermelon rind pickle, and candied citrus peel (especially orange and lemon). Also a depression era older friend told me you can make jellies from canned fruit liquid. We tried it and it comes out well. You follow the recipe on the pectin box and add the required sugar, so it is quite sweet, but some combos are fun.

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