Who Knew Vegetable Scraps Could Taste So Good?

The vegetable scraps you might normally toss in the garbage can make for a delicious meal when dressed up with the right…dressing.

UK chef April Bloomfield calls it a “bin salad”.

The author of the vegetable-forward A Girl and Her Greens, urged the audience at her talk at New York City’s 92nd Street Y Wednesday to save beet greens, chard stems, the end bits of fennel and lettuce, and the leaves around heads of cauliflower.

“The first thing you usually do is you cut the leaves off,” she said. “Leave them on! It’s really nice to be able to respect what you cook and just use things when you can if it makes sense.”

The same goes for broccoli stalks. “People throw them in the garbage, but that’s an extra portion. That’s money you can save.”

So here’s how to make a salad from items you might normally throw away: Keep those ribbons of carrot skin, those broccoli stalks, those chard stems, or those hearty leaves.

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Cut them small enough so that they’re easy to chew - shaved for the carrots, a 3cm dice for the broccoli stalks and chard stems, and bite-size pieces for the kale - and dress them in something with a lot of lemon juice or vinegar to help soften them.

We like to do a one-to-one mixture of lemon juice and olive oil with a bit of Dijon mustard, minced shallots, and salt and pepper. (One-to-one is a radical ratio, but that’s how we like it! Feel free to adjust if it’s too acidic for you.)

Toss them together and you’re finished!

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Feel free to add any end bits of cooked sausage, hard-boiled eggs, the almost-past-their-peaks knobs of cheese, or whatever else needs cleaning from the fridge.

And let us know how it goes.

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