Soup stock

I'm not sure why making soup stock at home is such a mysterious process to many people (including myself, up until recently). Maybe it's the gourmet-ish reputation, the pickiness about clarifying and straining out particles, the fact that it can be bought in ready-made cans and cartons so therefore it must be difficult to make. (Tricksy, tricksy Campbells!) But it's not finicky food; soup is probably one of the most basic ways to squeeze every last drop of nutrition out of your food, as broth can be made with scraps that would have otherwise gone into the garbage or compost.

The first step is to save the scraps. If you're not going to use them the same day, freeze them in an airtight baggie or tub.

Meat scraps such as bones, gristle, dry end slices from roasts and other 'inedible' leavings can all be used. My mother used to use the picked-clean bones from a turkey or chicken roast, or the central bone from a ham. You can use raw scraps if you have time to boil them long enough that they get cooked through. Poultry giblets and necks work well for this.

Veggie scraps can include anything that you aren't cutting up and eating. The stringy rooty ends of onions are great, even if they still have papery skin attached. If you've had fresh garlic on the shelf too long and it's gone a bit dry and rubbery, use those too. Carrots that are limp and dehydrated but not moldy or slimy can go too. Woody stem ends from kale, broccoli, and asparagus are all fair game. Your imagination and your tastes are the only limitations with veggies. Just make sure you know if any bits of the vegetable in question are actually toxic and should not be used in food (such as the green stems and leaves of carrots).

Please note that you don't have to use meat. Veggies by themselves make excellent stock. My favourite combination is kale, carrot, onion and garlic. For the longest time I avoided making veggie stock because I had just never seen anyone make stock with anything but meat. It's weird what kind of mental blocks we can set up for ourselves. Go figure.

The procedure is simple -- you need to boil the scraps in a pot of water until it turns into broth that tastes good. To make a more flavourful broth, use more scraps for the amount of water you have, and cook them longer. You can add salt during cooking, or just put salt on the table so that people can adjust it to their own tastes. If there are any pieces of stuff that you don't want in the soup at the end you need a way to remove them.

A meat bone can just be lifted out with tongs, and you'll have lots of little meaty shreds floating around in the soup. Vegetables tend to cook down to the point where they're disintegrating, which will make for a cloudy and nutritious broth. Fancy cookbooks will tell you to tie the scraps into a bag made of cheesecloth, and boil the bag. You can also use a metal steamer basket; just submerge it instead of keeping the water level below its floor. Failing that, you can pour the broth through a strainer into another pot after it's cooked. These last two are my favourites, as they remove big pieces of not-tasty stuff like onion paper, and keep all the nutritious soup sediment.

That's all there is to it. I haven't tried freezing stock after cooking it, because it takes up more room in the freezer; I tend to freeze the scraps and use what I need to make a pot of soup for immediate use. If you've got other things you want to throw in the soup, do so. Meat should be cooked for a long time in soup. Veggies, pasta and grains, and most dry legumes can be cooked in the broth until you like the texture. (Be careful with some beans -- kidney beans are toxic when undercooked, so they need to be cooked until they're soft enough to mash with your tongue.)

I think I should write about beans next. Stay tuned.

Dusting off the old food blog

*cough* *hack*

In light of what's happening in "America's breadbasket", I'm going to make an effort to actually write in this thing.

I'm hearing more from people who are actually there than from the news media. I read it in someone's blog first, before the media considered it newsworthy. We can't sit around passively and wait for the media to spoon-feed us information; we need to network and talk to each other. One thing I've been hearing is that people want more recipes for what to do with cheap raw staple foods. If you have a request for information on a specific food, post it here and I'll see what I can come up with.

I'm not going to talk much about growing food, because I know a better site for that. Gayla Trail's You Grow Girl website and book are primarily aimed at urban gardeners -- people who want to grow food in a small yard, on a balcony, or in an allotment garden. The information still applies to people who own larger plots of land, of course, but if you're in a city you still have options. The most useful part of that site to me has been the online community, where you can pick the brains of hundreds of other gardeners around the world. (If you see Indefatigable hanging around in there, that's me.)

We don't know how far this will spread or how bad it will get before it starts to get better, but people have had to do this before. Google "victory gardens" if you want to see how people fed themselves during World War II, when a lot of industrially-produced food was being rationed. The only difference today is that in the 1940s, Americans, Brits, and Canadians were used to eating a lot of fresh food anyways. Today we might feel lost at first without prepackaged frozen dinners, but we'll get used to it. We still have access to soil and water and seeds, and we have kitchens.