Vanderbrew

I just opened a jar of strawberry preserves we made back in May of 2006 to put on some bread that my wife made. I really like that we can (and do) do this.

A few tips for making stock that I’ve read or discovered on my own.

• If you’ve got a pasta insert for your stock pot, use it when you make stock. It’s much easier to strain out the solid bits and vegetables when you get most of them in one big batch.
• Use celery. I’ve found that stock just plain tastes better when I include celery.
• When you use parsley in cooking, save the stems and freeze them. Then, when you’re making stock, take them out and use them for your parsley component.
• Get a skimmer to skim the fat from the stock after it’s cooled. Amber got me one of these for Christmas and it’s been wonderful.
• We usually make stock from the carcass after we cook a chicken in the crock pot. Just cut off all the meat you can find, then put all the bones, skin, fat, reserved neck, etc into the stock pot to make the stock.

We bought a sourdough starter months ago because we both really enjoy sourdough bread.

We mixed up the starter two weeks ago because we had time and thought it would be a great idea.

The starter got contaminated and we had to wash it. And wash it. And wash it.

About a week and a half ago, everything seemed good and I made some bread from it. It turned out pretty well. Had a nice sour taste and the crust looks pretty much how it is supposed to. It didn’t rise as much as I’d hoped it would but I think that that’s due to not letting it proof long enough and interrupting the kneading to stop and have dinner.

Your supposed to steam the bread while it bakes to get that perfect sourdough crust. I saw directions talking about misting the bread frequently or spraying the sides of the oven and it all seemed like a fair bit of work. I decided to just put boiling water in our cast iron skillet and place it in the lukewarm oven. The bread went onto a stone which was cold. and I put that into the oven a few minutes after the water. A really nice steamy environment had built up and the crust came out ok.

I forgot to slash the bread so it popped during baking but it seems like that added a little bit of rustic charm to the loaves.

It ended up baking for about 90 minutes but that’s probably mostly due to starting out with a stone and nothing being preheated fully.

We used two cups of the lime and cilantro chicken stock to make the tortilla soup on Tuesday and it was phenomenal. I’m a big fan of Mexican food and this soup was just fantastic. I think I put a bit too much onion in it - probably should have only diced two, not three (they were small onions, honest!) - but it was still tasty.

It only took 3.5 hours in the slow cooker and Amber made some great tortilla chips to go with it. All-in-all a delicious meal.

Now, we just need to figure out what to do with the remaining 16 cups of stock…Oh, well, at least we’ve got a freezer big enough to hold it.

In our house cooking the chicken and making stock generally falls on my shoulders. I don’t mind at all - I thoroughly enjoy it. Making stock is a really liberating experience for me.

I’m one of those very focused, engineer types who can cook most things that there’s a recipe for, but don’t you dare ask me to improvise or deviate from the recipe - except for chicken stock.

Chicken stock is really cool stuff. You just start with a basic recipe (chicken, carrots, celery, garlic, etc) and then you can change it up as you see fit. From what I can tell, it’s hard to make a bad chicken stock. It’s the one cooking area where I don’t need a recipe. I just throw some stuff together and wing it.

Now, some of you may be wondering, “Yeah, that’s cool, I get it…but Lime and Cilantro?” Well, we cooked “Mexican-Style Lime and Cilantro Whole Chicken”[1] in the slow cooker and had soft tacos for dinner tonight. I always make stock from the carcass and I was looking at this thinking “Man, I’d really like to make stock…but this’ll have a funny flavor…”.

Then it hit me - I’ll accentuate the lime and cilantro flavors and we’ll use it as a base for Tortilla Soup and other soups like that! So, in addition to the onion, carrots and celery I usually put in the stock, I threw in the lime rind and cilantro we cooked in the cavity of the bird. Also, I tossed in some additional cilantro and a couple dried chilies.

I’m hoping it turns out well and will be another step along the path of free-form cooking. We’ve already got a Tortilla Soup recipe picked out (slow cooker one, from the same cookbook) and we’ll be making it on Tuesday.

I’ll be sure to let you all know how it turns out.

[1] Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker Cookbook

We’re kindah different from a lot of people out there, I think:

• We make sausage and freeze it.
• We cook and freeze beans from scratch.
• We cook whole chickens in the slow cooker, make stock from the carcass and freeze it.
• We run out of space in our side-by-side refrigerator/freezer.

And, we no longer have that problem because we are the proud owners of a new 14.8 cubic foot chest freezer. This is a big freezer - the kind of freezer that you can store a half a cow in - and we love it.

It lets us do things like:

• Buy 4 chickens when they’re on sale at $.69/pound and freeze them.
• Buy a 12 pound ham when it’s on sale for $1.29/pound right after Christmas and (after hacking it up into manageable chunks) freeze it.
• Make batch after batch of stock, beans and sausage w/out worrying about what’s going to fall out next time you open the door, provided you can even get it closed this time.

There’s a real joy in knowing you can make kidney beans, chickpeas, black beans, cannellini beans and put them all in the freezer along with half the beef stew and a quarter of the turkey soup and not have to worry about making it all fit.

Hmm…maybe I should start soaking some beans…

I like good food. It’s a taste that I think has changed over the years and it’s only grown with both my advances in the culinary arts and teh fact that I married a woman who’s a wonderful cook. Tonight we had a Green Chile Sausage Souffle with Mexican Rice and Broccoli and Carrots with Lime Dressing.

The rice was ok. For some reason it didn’t cook all the way even though it was cooking for twice as long as the direction said and we added more water as it cooked to keep the moisture up. Amber thinks that maybe it was too hot at the beginning and water boiled off, affecting the rice’s ability to absorb. Who knows, next time I think we’ll do the prep work in the sauce pan on the stove (sauteing the onion, garlic and rice in oil) then combine the rest of the ingredients and water in the rice cooker.

The broccoli and carrots were pretty good. It was an interesting dressing that included dark sesame oil, soy sauce, honey and lime juice. The veggies were boiled for 5 min and then cooled quickly in a colander before serving. The taste wasn’t perfect for the rest of the meal but it went pretty well.

The souffle was awesome. The recipe caught my eye because I made Southwestern Green Chile Poultry sausage last weekend with a friend and that was a key ingredient. Preparation involved roasting 8 peppers and pealing the skin off, slitting them and stuffing with a slice of monterey jack cheese. I’d never roasted peppers myself before and I’d always been a little afraid of the process. Last weekend however, we had to roast peppers for the sausage and my friend Matthew did it under the broiler and it went flawlessly so I lost my fear of the process. On top of the peppers was scattered the cooked sausage and we spooned the egg, milk, flour, spice mix over the top of that and baked it. Man, it was good. Definitely a recipe that we’ll have to make again.

Right now, I’ve got some cracked wheat in our smaller crockpot cooking for breakfast in the morning and some pinto beans soaking in the big crockpot. I’ll cook the pintos tomorrow and maybe make refried beans on Tuesday. We finally got the slow cooker cookbook that we ordered almost a month ago and both Amber and I are very glad of that. If anyone’s in the market for a slow cooker cookbook, I definitely recommend Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker Cookbook. We “test drove” it from the library for a few weeks and it’s definitely a keeper.

If you’re a sausage lover, I highly recommend Bruce Aidells’ Complete Sausage Book. The first half of the book is how to make sausage and a bunch of different types to make. The second half of the book is all sorts of recipes to cook with sausage. You don’t have to make your own sausage to enjoy the book, but I’m pretty sure it helps. Last weekend I made French Toast Stuffed with Chicken and Apple Sausage (with Sauteed Apple Slices on top) and it was absolutely fantastic.