One of the things I like about cooking, especially with fresh ingredients, is knowing exactly what I’m putting in my body. I’m not health conscious, just look at my waist line, but I like using fresh ingredients. No processed crap for me, please. Living in the dorm in college was quite challenging for me.
But I digress, back to the stock.
Ingredients: carrots, onions, potato, celery, garlic, mushrooms, tomatoes, parsley, a lot of water.
Basically, you can use whatever you have around. Save your scraps for a few days and make it. I failed to read that part until after I stocked up an ALL the above ingredients. Oops. It was fine though, it made a delicious stock and I have used the remaining fresh veggies in other dishes.
14 cups of water over your veggies makes about 12 cups of stock. So be prepared with baggies or other containers to freeze some for later.
I made my own chicken stock all of the times. Not very flavorful, but good enough for me. I usually buy whatever form of bone-in chicken on sale, such as a whole chicken, a tray of bone-in chicken breasts, or a tray of bone-in chicken thighs. Then on the weekend, I spent 1/2 to one hour deboning the chicken pieces. I just used enough water to cover the bones along with some onion, carrots, and celery. The rest of the chicken went to the freezer. I have been doing this for many years and my boning skill is getting better. Paul.
ReplyDeleteDo you do anything with the vegetables and chicken afterwards? It seems wasteful to have all that left over and just throw it away.
ReplyDeleteThe deboned chicken meats are saved in the freezer for later use. To prevent sticking of the pieces when they freeze, I put one to two pieces (depending on the size) in a resealable lunch bag, and put those lunch bags in a larger freezer bag. Those lunch bags are only 1.5 cents a piece. The thigh meats are used in any of the braising recipes in pages 649 to 652, or ANY of the chicken, turkey, cornish hens, squab, pheasant, and possibly quail recipes. The only exception is duck recipes. Breasts are limited to his breast recipes. I made chicken Caciatora (sp?) once with breasts according to an American Heart Association cookbook, and it was not very good- the breasts were overcooked. The stock is made only with the bones, half of an onion, and a little bit of carrots and sometimes a little bit of celery. Those parts are to be thrown away since there are little meats left on the bones. If there are a lot of meats stuck on the bones, I cooked the stock for 20 minutes, pull those parts out to retrieve the meat and put the bones back in the pot. If you cook the meat for two hours, the meat is wasted. Paul.
ReplyDeleteOh, I forgot to talk about the vegetables. The onions and carrots last a long time in the fridge. The celery is more perisable, so I thrown them in the freezer if I don't use it within a week. The celery from the freezer when used is kind of mushy, but that is good enough for me. I make a lot of bean soups in large quantity and freeze them in those lunch bags I mentioned (good for weekend project). The kind of bean soups suitable for freezing is the one without a lot of hard vegetables such as lentils soups (p. 138), black bean soups (p. 137), bean and green (p. 136 and can be any other greens such as spinach and mustard), basic bean (136), spit pea(p. 138 and add a ham bone or hock here). The only soup that is not good for freezing is minestrone (123) because the hard veggies turns mushy after freezing. By the way, I always cook from dried beans and not from the canned one. I hate to put more cans in the landfills. Also, for soups or sauce making purpose, you could plant a couple of tomato plants in the summer, collect the harvest and put it in the freezer for use for the rest of the year. You could also buy a lot of tomatoes when they are on sale to be put in the freezer. Paul.
ReplyDeleteAnother idea to save money on parsley. Bittman calls for parsley in so many recipes. So, I planted two pots (8 inches in diameter by 8 inches deep) of flat leaf. In my Los Angeles area, I can leave the pots outside year round. The coldest temperature in get here is 50 degrees in the winter. In your area, you may have to take the pots inside at night in the winter. I don't know for sure. Paul.
ReplyDeleteI bought some parsley, as well as other herbs, this spring and planted them outside in a towered plant stand. The parsley was towards the bottom and apparently my dog liked it because she ate it all. My basil and cilantro have recently died. I'll probably consider trying parlsey inside again, I just need to find a good spot to put it. I do hate buying it constantly.
ReplyDeleteIf your dead basil and cilantro plants are still around, save those dried flower buds. You can use them as seeds in the next season. Same thing goes for parsley, but parsley does not flower (or die) after two years. Paul.
ReplyDelete