A good chicken stock is more than chicken-flavored water. Though you should aim for your stock to be flavorful, a good one should also be rich and mouth-coating, with a body that just won't quit. This, my friends, is why you should make your stock with chicken feet.

Video: If you're a reader of Eating Trash With Claire the Lifehacker series where I convince you to transform your kitchen scraps into something edible and delicious - you should get excited, because it's now a video series. First up, I show you how to make a delicious, flavour-packed stock out of scraps, shells, and other "trash" that is actually treasure. Enjoy!

Vegetarian and vegan cooking should celebrate vegetables rather than forcing them into a meat-shaped box. I'll take "oh damn, I didn't know I liked eggplant" over "this is surprisingly tasty, but I'd rather eat real bacon" any day of the week.

The stock pot is often the ultimate destination for all sorts of kitchen trash, but once the liquid has been drained away, some of those scraps - namely, carrots - still have more to give.

Stock is the backbone of so many recipes. Whether it's used as a cooking liquid for rice or beans, or as the base of a soup or gravy, the quality of your stock influences the quality of your final dish. Though it isn't hard to make, there are a few tweaks you can make to ensure yours is a rich and tasty stock that's anything but watery.

Making chicken stock at home is great -- you end up with a house that smells like soup and a pot full of savoury broth. Whether you make your stock from fresh ingredients or saved-up scraps, one secret ingredient will help make your chicken stock extra rich and delicious.

Whenever I have the chance to buy prawns shell-on -- or, better yet, head-on -- I take it. Deveining and then cooking prawns in their shells is the tastiest way to go, and there's something very satisfactory about peeling them just before popping them into your mouth. But their journey shouldn't end there; the shells still have more to give.

Store-bought broths and stocks are certainly convenient, but they lack the silky texture and mouthfeel that you get from simmering bones for hours on end, extracting all of that wonderful collagen. To make the box stuff taste and feel more homemade, just add a little gelatin.

If you are a lover of miso soup, you have most likely heard of dashi, an umami-blasted cooking stock made of seaweed (specifically kombu) and fermented tuna. If you want to make your own super savoury elixir, but don't have any tuna lying around, you can make a smoky spin-off using bacon.

Making risotto is a beautiful process. Slowly stirring in ladles of hot broth and letting everything get all creamy and luscious is a cathartic act, and there's no reason to limit this method to rice. You can do the same with pasta, and the results are delicious.