"stock" news and stories

Next time you gear up to boil shrimp, take a cue from the pros and make a stock.

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"To me, making stock is a hassle, and antithetical to home cooking. It belongs to the realm of professional kitchens with salaried dishwashers," writes Jane Sigal in the New York Times. My sentiments exactly. But luckily for those of us suffering the kind of late-winter malaise that only a rich, home-cooked soup can cure, the answer is at hand: Soup bones.

Now that nose-to-tail dining seems to have a permanent place in the foodie firmament, soup bones have gone from being the kind of thing only offered at obscure butcher shops in far-flung ethnic neighborhoods to something you can find next to the organic pork chops at your local farmer's market. And the bones on offer have gone beyond the traditional beef shank and hog trotter, with goat bones and bison marrow popping up in the stew pot as well.

Sigal offers up four soup recipes, all enriched with a different kind of bone: Tangy red lentil soup with nicoise olives, which calls for chicken backs; creamy celery root soup with ham, which uses a ham bone; lima bean and porcini soup, using either lamb neck bones on beef shin bones; and a beets and greens borscht with shin bones.

Source

Alright, Slashfoodies. I have another strange occurrence for you to explain, one that makes the butterscotch cookie mishap seem like nothing -- one that makes me wonder if I've stepped into the kitchen version of the Twilight Zone.

Above, you can check out a slightly blurry (sorry!) picture of my freezer. Since I recently roasted up a chicken, I also made myself some delicious stock. The other day, I got to packaging it for the freezer, and threw most of it into three zip lock bags. I stacked them on the base of my freezer, as shown, so that they could freeze flat and then be moved around.

A day later, the bottom bag was hard as a rock, and the other two were merely very cold and jiggly -- no ice. Confused, I rejigged the setup -- the bottom went on the top, and the door was closed. When I checked again, the new bottom one was now frozen, and the other two were jiggly. Aggravated, I took the picture you see above, and then rearranged a bit and moved one of the bags up to the second shelf. As of now, the one jiggly bag is starting to slush and freeze.

What on earth could cause this? It sure isn't thawing -- the rest of the inhabitants are solid. It's not over or under-packing the freezer, because I've done similar before in emptier and more full freezers.

Please solve this mystery and save my sanity!

Making stock and soup usually takes a lot of prep and time. But if you're itching to get a fully made and finished soup pronto, Pim is once again coming to the rescue with an easy and quicker way to get results. First, tomato sauce. Now, chicken soup!

The recipe isn't nearly as speedy as the sauce, but it definitely cuts down on the time usually allotted to stock and soup making. Her twist is to combine the two into one recipe. She starts the soup, cooks the chicken in it, takes it out when done, and then re-adds the bones to simmer for a half hour.

Having soup ready for the table in just a few hours sounds downright perfect to me. Maybe it will get me out of my habit to stock pile turkey soup each Thanksgiving.