Eat your veggie waste; it's good for you

Supposedly, the French are healthier than Americans despite eating diets higher in fat, cigarettes, and booze.  This is the so-called French paradox, and led to research that discovered health benefits from drinking red wine.  Yet I sometimes wonder if the French paradox is likelier due to how French cooking makes use of seemingly every last scrap of a plant or animal.  Bone marrow is a fatty delicacy, while the bone solids make lovely broth and scraps of vegetables can be tied into a garni, simmered to infuse their flavor into a dish, and then removed.

When we grew broccoli in our garden, they produced so may huge leaves (and our cabbage & bok choy crop performed so poorly) that we began harvesting the broccoli greens to use in place of cabbage & bok choy.  We froze the broccoli stalks to feed to the dog, until my beloved found a recipe for broccoli mimolet (pureed soup) in an old French cookbook.  Fresh-from-the-garden veggies are especially yummy and, if you compost, they add almost nothing to your weekly trash load.

Indeed, many of the food scraps we discard are actually rather nutritious.  December's Oprah Magazine highlights 5.  Celery tops, for example, have more magnesium & calcium than celery stalks. Onion skins are rich in atioxidants (particularly quercetin).  And broccoli leaves are loaded with Vitamin A.
Looks like my ultimate french cookbook was a healthy eating guide, too.