Taking Stock

Phil and I recently cleared out and defrosted our deep freezer in anticipation of our annual quarter-cow purchase from a local farmer. In the midst of organizing, using up, or throwing out Parmesan rinds that I saved in 2008 and was sure I would use to flavor soups, five bags of edamame, a large stock of beef from last year's cow, and various other treasures, I made a gruesome discovery. The chicken carcasses I'd been saving for making stock "some day" created a veritable graveyard of Ziploc-enclosed body bags stacked at the back corner of the freezer. This macabre collection needed to be used up or thrown out, and some Depression-era gene couldn't let me just toss what I felt held potential for putting up stock.

Up to this point, I'd made stock once. Using the soup bones that had amassed with our cow delivery, I followed Julia's recipe in The Way to Cook. The recipe took our biggest pot, two years of soup bones, lots of vegetables, and six precious weekend hours. For my effort, I got two quarts of stock. Lovely stock, but the thought of devoting the next eight weekends to chicken stock wore me out.

Then I found the slow cooker recipe on NourishingDays, and I've since become a stock junkie, using up the chicken bones, as well as a turkey carcass from a turkey breast also found in the freezer. The stock is now frozen (in our newly defrosted and recently restocked freezer), lined up in quart canning jars, and waiting for winter soup making. It's crazy-easy, and because it uses kitchen leftovers, virtually free. I'm tickled pink every time I make stock. Tickled. Pink.

I now keep a gallon Ziploc bag in my main freezer in our kitchen, and all the stock-appropriate scraps from vegetables and herbs go in there: onion skins, half a rosemary stalk, carrot peelings, celery that's gone limp.

Here's how to make it:


Easy-Peasy Slow Cooker Stock

Two chicken carcasses, or whatever will fit in your slow cooker
Water
1 to 2 Tbsp. apple cider vinegar
A couple handfuls of frozen vegetable leavin's

Put the chicken carcasses in the slow cooker, and add enough water to cover. Pour in the vinegar, cover, and let it sit, without turning on the slow cooker, for about an hour. This tip from NourishingDays.com lets you extract some of the nutrients from the bones. After an hour, add a couple handfuls of the vegetable droppings you've saved for stock, cover, and turn to low. Leave it alone for 24 hours. After 24 hours, strain through a coffee filter, paper towel, or cheesecloth, and either use the stock in a couple days, or freeze for later.


Used to be I'd buy organic stock at Costco. Six four-cup (e.g.,one quart) boxes are around $10. This recipe in my cooker usually gives me about two quarts. FOR FREE, as I keep reiterating to my long-suffering husband. Just kitchen scraps. And water. I so love this.

I Stand Corrected

Teensy issue in the last post. I forgot the number 1 rule of converting traditional recipes to slow-cooker recipes: You don't need so much liquid. In fact, generally speaking, you can cut liquids in half because they don't cook off in a slow cooker.

So use 1 quart of chicken stock, not 2. My bad. The soup was still delicious, but when I came home and realized the error of my ways, I cooked it down a bit to get to the consistency I wanted. I fixed the entry, but wanted to point out my goof.

Incidentally, if you're doing it on the stove, use the two quarts, bring everything to a boil, and then turn down to a gentle simmer for 45 or so minutes -- until the beans are soft.

Late Spring Meal: White Bean Soup and Homemade Croutons

Julia Child always said you should never apologize. I think she meant for the state of your home or the dinner you're serving, not if, say, you rear-ended another motorist. But I'm guessing it also applies to not updating a blog for, oh, almost three months. So I'll just move on.

Something comes over me when I go to Costco. Suddenly I'm stocking up a fallout shelter and really need two dozen kiwi. Last week I bought two huge loaves of multigrain La Brea Bakery bread. Then we went out of town. Consequently, even with me and Phil doing our best to gnaw our way through the enormous bag, I still found myself staring at one and a half drying loaves last night. Not in the mood for bread pudding, which I always associate with winter, I made croutons.


Homemade Croutons

They're easy. Just preheat the oven to 400 degrees, cut the bread into one-inch or so cubes, lay them on a rimmed cookie sheet, drizzle them lightly with olive oil, and stir around a bit to get them a teensy bit coated. Pop them in the oven for 10 minutes, stir around a bit more, and bake them for another 5 to 15 minutes, checking every 5 minutes. Once they're golden, they're ready. If you have a cheap and temperamental oven like mine, some might end up black while others are barely browned. Just chuck the black ones; no one deserves to eat burned croutons.


White Bean Soup

Staring at the Ziploc bag of croutons this morning, I decided to make a soothing white bean soup to go with. While I love stirring bean soup contemplatively, it's a workday, so I enlisted the help of my slow cooker. The recipe basically comes from The Barefoot Contessa, still one of my all-time favorite cookbooks.

Medium chop 2 or 3 yellow onions -- it's going to make 3 or 4 cups of chopped onion. In a skillet over medium-high heat, heat up a few good glugs of olive oil -- 3 or 4 tablespoons. Dump in the onions and let them cook until they're a little wilty and translucent. Now add in a couple minced cloves of garlic. Let that continue simmering for a few minutes. Pour everything into a slow cooker and add 1 quart of chicken stock, 2 cups of rinsed white beans (I never soak them), a bay leaf, and a nice branch of fresh rosemary. Set it to low and go to work.

When I come home tonight, I'll strip the rosemary leaves from the branch, throw away the branch, and then puree the soup using an immersion blender. You can add some salt and pepper to taste here.

In a shallow bowl topped with a couple drops of olive oil, maybe a little bit of fresh minced rosemary, and a small handful of croutons, this soup's going to make one nice dinner after a crazy-hectic week.


I love this soup. It's so much more than the sum of its parts. I used to make lots of bean soups when I was following that crazy Susan Powter's low-fat plan in the early 90s. The soups were functional and cheap, but not delicious. As with everything, I find that bean soups really need some fat to make them not taste like something out of Oliver Twist.

Meanwhile, if anyone has any ideas for the bowlful of limes I bought last week, I'm all ears.

Slow Cooking the Crazed Kitchen Way

My college roommate Julia has a wonderful blog called Hooked On Houses that tracks decorating trends, celebrity houses, Home-a-ramas -- basically anything involved with the housing market. I see the spacious, clutter-free homes on her site, and go away to a world that does not entail a small Cape Cod filled with the toys of three kids and the overwhelming book stacks of two ratpack adults. Some day, I tell myself.

This is a great parallel to our food life. Things have been more hectic than normal lately, with my work travel increasing and Sylvia getting more mobile and feisty, and I find I'm spending my time thumbing through cookbooks that celebrate slow, unfettered kitchen time; long meals stretching long into the night; and an insistence on ingredients of only the best quality. A favorite line I recently read, "If you've ever been to Barcelona, you know some of the best anchovies in the world are found there." I'm dreaming of a time when I can not only travel to Barcelona, but have the clarity of mind to recognize the superiority of its anchovies.

Meanwhile, I'm letting the books take me away, like a Calgon bath. My two favorites for these armchair cooking trips recently have been David Tanis's A Platter of Figs (and Other Recipes) and Paula Wolfert's The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen: Recipes for the Passionate Cook.

The reality is that these days on those nights when we don't have take-out or "silly supper" (i.e., breakfast for supper, which is usually cereal) or warmed-up frozen corndogs, my best friend has become my slow cooker. I'm always of two minds on the slow cooker because it seems things either come out breathtakingly wonderful, or are a one-color brown mess that I picture being served in a cut-rate nursing home. And cooking in our slow-cooker always means we'll have enough food to feed the block, so it's not a tool I pull out daily.

A recent boon to my slow-cooker repertoire has been the discovery of A Year of CrockPotting, an amazing blog in which writer and slow-cooker addict Stephanie chronicled her successful attempt to cook with her trio of slow cookers every day for a year. I can't even imagine how much food this would produce, but I love the blog nonetheless.

Two recent recipes I've tried and loved are the rib recipe Nikki Royer included in her interview a couple years ago (even my picky boys love ribs) and a slightly modified version of the Taco Soup recipe from A Year of Crockpotting. (Stephanie's original recipe is here.)

Stephanie raved about the recipe, and I have to admit when I initially made it, I was somewhat "meh" on the first night we had it. But it made a ton of soup, so I ate it for lunch for a week, and every day it got better until by Friday I was thinking about it all morning and ripping into my lunch at 11:20. If I were making it for a crowd, like for a Super Bowl party, I'd be inclined to make it a couple days early, refrigerate it to let the flavors all meld together, and reheat it before the guests came. I'd also serve it with sour cream, shredded cheese, shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes... you get the idea. I also liked that this helped clear out my pantry; I tend to stock up on canned food like I'm preparing for the apocalypse.

Be sure to have your recycling bin cleared out before you start this. You'll be filling it!


Slightly Modified Taco Soup

1 pound ground meat
1 packet taco seasoning
1 packet ranch dressing mix
2 cans of kidney beans, drained
2 cans of black beans, drained
2 cans of corn, drained
1 large can of diced tomatoes, undrained
1 can mild chopped chiles, undrained
About half a can (use one of the bean cans) of water

Brown and drain the meat. Put the meat in the slow cooker. Sprinkle the seasoning mixes on top. Dump everything else on top of that, and cook on low for about 8 hours. While eating, surrounded by your fighting boys and yelling baby girl, take a moment to dream of the superior anchovies in Barcelona.