Veggie Broth – Not Nearly as Difficult as Imagined

We’ve been mostly vegan for a very long time. We have for not quite as long, but still a good 5+ years, tried to limit our processed food intake.  One of the items I’ve never really considered replacing with homemade was vegetable broth.  It just seemed too complicated and time-consuming to consider making our own, when a nice steri-pak variety which contain only whole ingredients could be bought for an affordable price.  Why did I want to invest such a huge amount of effort?  Lately though, as our hearts get older, we’ve started working to reduce our sodium intake as well.  If you’ve ever checked out the FDA Nutrition label on even the “healthy” veggie broth, the sodium can be a little daunting.

So I bit the bullet and gave making my own broth a try.  Turns out it can be SUPER easy, and relatively quick.  Plus I can make a big batch and keep it in the fridge for up to a week, or the freezer for even longer.

My current favorite recipe is this: 

Vegan Eggplant Meatballs

Thursday is spaghetti night in our house.  Occasionally we mix it up a little and have lasagna.  Since we had found some beautiful eggplants at the farmer’s market, this week was supposed to be a lasagna week.  This morning I dutifully sliced and salted my eggplant in preparation. When I went to make the lasagna, however, I realized I had neglected to pick up the other ingredients I needed, most notably the lasagna noodles.  Which sent me on a search for a recipe to avoid wasting my beautiful eggplants.

A quick search on “vegan eggplant recipe” turned up this Vegan Eggplant Meatball recipe.  Meatballs would be perfect to go with the spaghetti.  After a few modifications, to match the ingredients I had on hand and to make it gluten-free (so I could eat them too!), the recipe looked like this:

My first attempt at most recipes gives barely edible results, but these were very yummy. Scoring 7/8, meaning 7 of the 8 people in my house both ate them and were willing to eat them again if I made them.

We call that an unmitigated success around here.