Bullion ... Veggie, Not Gold.

Soup Monday. I've been on a recent trend of cooking soup every Monday. At first it was by chance and then it just seemed like a nice trend to keep up. Gluten-free broth is sometimes hard to find and frankly, broth is expensive for what it really is. I've had Heidi Swanson's Homemade Bullion {{http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/homemade-bouillon-recipe.html}} on my to-make list since I first saw it on 101cookbooks and realized it was a great chance to save some money (it makes a lot!) and also control what was going into the base of my soups.

I had a lot of veggies on hand from that week's CSA delivery (shout out to farmfreshtoyou.com) so I added a few things from the store and ended up with this lot:
What's that thing on the right that looks like it belongs in a Harry Potter potion you ask? Well that's celeraic, or celery root. And its just that. The root from the stalks of celery. And it tastes like, well, celery, but in more of a jicima texture. A closer look:
Admittedly I've never used it before and clearly I'm not the only one. The clerk at the grocery store check out said, "Ew, what is this?" when it came across the belt. Nice.

The final product looked a lot like Heidi's and has been successfully used in many soup recipes. I keep it in the freezer and since it has salt in it (although we halved the salt amount in order to be able to add it to each recipe as needed), it doesn't freeze solid and it is very easy to pull a few teaspoons out for each recipe.

I used approximate measurements given what I had on hand. My sun-dried tomatoes were not fresh and didn't grind up as well as they should have. Lessons learned.