Home Made Chicken Soup from Scratch

We have colds right now and are not feeling very well. So I made some homemade chicken stock and chicken soup. Yesterday I cooked up the stock.

I took a couple of chicken backs and a couple of pounds of chicken wings and tossed them in the big pot with a moir poix and a handful of garlic and peppercorns. That simmered for 6 hours then cooled it in the sink with lots of cool water to get it out of the danger zone quickly. I then pulled out all the chunkys and got rid of those. The meat and vegetables had given their all and were dead again. I chilled the stock over night. It came out beautifully like chicken jello and skimmed off the fat and froze that for roux making later.

I finely diced up another moir poix and lots of garlic and sauteed that to get a little flavor on it and some parsley and marjoram. I also sauteed a couple of chicken breasts and diced them and returned them to the pot with everything else. I used about 1.5 cups of the stock and enough water to cover everything. I also added some spinach and ricotta raviolinni to round it all out. My wife says it completely blows Campbells and Progresso out of the water and was even better then Momma used to make. It certainly seemed to take the edge off for me.

Learning from Other Peoples' Resolutions

One of the fun things about Web is that you get to see other people experimenting. Wisdom is learning from others' mistakes or successes.

So, Steve is going to eat raw food for the next 30 days and so far it seems to be going well. I say good for him.

Some of the things seem obvious to me. Feeling like you are on an emotional high all the time makes sense because you are eating huge quantities of sugar from the fruit.

The thing I was surprised about was the time commitment, lots of time for prep and lots for eating as well.

We like to cook and make fun meals so watching someone go all raw in interesting. We have learned quite a bit about nutrition and who the body handles food and what cooking does to food.

But humans are not herbivores. Cows with 4 stomachs and some exotic gut bacteria and the ability to chew the cud can do it. We don't have the gut systems to break down the nutrients locked behind the walls of cellulose. But we have a tool (fire) to break down cellulose for us so we can get to the good stuff.

Some cooking techniques are better then others. That is no great surprise. Boiling vegetables until they are dead again is obviously not going to deliver maximum nutrition to you. We really like broccoli steamed in the microwave with a couple of teaspoons of water or chicken broth and some crushed garlic topped with sea salt.

In any case, I like to combine ingredients and heat to make food.

I've also come to realize just how amazing globalization has become. Virtually all the food that Steve is eating had to come from outside the country, because none of it is in season on this side of the globe. It is wintertime and there just aren't a lot of fresh foods available naturally.

This makes for an interesting dilemma: On the one hand many vegetarians I know are very big on the environment, but the only way to support their lifestyle is to fly in large quantities of food from around the world to allow them to eat. And all that transportation is a heavy burden on the environment, as we saw with that global warming summit in Bali.

Out diets are far more diverse now then ever before. If you went back 100 years there were plenty of canned and boxed foods and most of us would even recognize many of the brand names, though the selection would be much smaller.

Go back 200 years from today and there was no canned food. It wasn't until 1809 that the process of canning food was invented. Before that you had drying, smoking, pickling, curing and salting. Go enough to get you through the winter but tiresome all the same.

I am pretty sure that just 50 years ago doing a raw vegan diet would have been impossible for most regions of the planet. But then the Eskimos have survived on whale blubber for a long time. Humans can survive and thrive on an amazing variety of foods. From hunter/gatherers to herder/farmers it didn't change all that much, each region of the planet got good at different local foods. Now we can ship them pretty much anywhere. Amzing.

Dream Home 2.0 Kitchen Cutting Station

The knife has been the most basic tool of the kitchen since the Neolithic era. It lets you get things ready for the application of heat which is cooking.

I don't like walking around the kitchen with a big knife when the little one is around and there is a lot of time wasted going to the sink and back to wash it for the next item.

So what makes up a good kitchen cutting station:
• First, it has to be at a good height. If you are close to average the typical countertop is fine. You are looking for your arms to be bent at a comfortable angle, if it is too far away then stacking a few cutting boards can help if you are too short a few rubber mats can help.
• Easy access to the sink, The cutting station should be on the same counter as the sink, that way you can clean the knife without swinging it where people can be walking. Since food is always cleaned before use anyway, having the sink right there also saves quite a bit of time.
• Storage for knives and cutting boards is essential, there is no point to having to walk across the kitchen to bring it to the right place to use it. I like a knife block with horizontal slots since the blades won't be resting on anything and dulling. With separate cutting boards for vegetables and meat keeping them someplace is important too.
• Plenty of counter space for freedom of movement. The space for cutting should be 36-48 inches (91-122 cm) wide. That gives you plenty of elbow room when the knives are moving and you have a pile of ingredients. Ideally, I want enough space on both sides to have a half sheet pan to hold raw ingredients on one side and prepared ingredients on the other. At least having handy access to plates and bowls for finished goods is great.
• A place to put a cookbook to check on ingredient amounts would be great too.
• For cleanup, a place for paper towels, and sanitizer to kill those nasty germs should be handy too.
• Placement, the cutting station should be closer to the food storage are then the serving area because you are going to be preparing food and often cooking it rather then serving it directly.

On Food Preservation

"Food Preservation

Jim wrote:

"..My son has been raised to an urban lifestyle; we planted a few tomato plants a couple of times with variable success, but haven't done significant gardening. I've recently had cause to reflect that he knows nothing about food preservation (and the opportunity that he had to learn something about the subject passed unheeded)."

While farming is a complex skill best learned at the knee of an expert, canning and freezing can be quickly learned by an absolute novice with a copy of Joy of Cooking or, I believe, Fannie Farmer. I know this because the results were delicious and safe, often on the first try. Don't despair.

-Tim Herbst
"

I would also recommend the Ball Blue Book of Canning. We've used that any number of times and the results are great.

Alton Brown on Good Eats did several shows on canning, jamming and pickling. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has canneries scattered around the world that are wonderful resources too.There are other community canning groups as well so look around food is a great way to make friends.

You know you're a foodie...

when you have six different kinds of salt in you cupboard.

We made a run to the Penzey's spice store over in Old Town Arvada. That is always fun because they have jars of spices that you can get a good sniff from.

Among other things we picked up some Diamond Kosher salt, which is a much different size compared to our standard Morton's Kosher flake salt and so I wanted to try how that works in food.

We also picked up some course salt for grinding as we have a salt grinder that is almost empty.

We have some Pacific Sea salt that makes for a nice finishing salt.

Finally we have ordinary table salt and popcorn salt. The popcorn salt is a very fine salt that is great on popcorn and fried foods.