Fun with Soup Stock

As I've mentioned in a few previous posts, I save chicken (and duck, and turkey, and lamb) bones in order to make my own soup stock. This results in me having, first, random bags of bones sitting in the back of my freezer, and second, large amounts of soup stock sitting in my freezer. Which means even when I'm busy, I have easy access to quality soup. It's easy enough to make soup stock: fill your pot 2/3 or 3/4 up the way with bones. You can add in some veggie scraps if you have them - or some garlic, or onion, or celery - for a bit rounder a flavor. I usually toss things like corn cobs in a plastic bag and save those in my freezer as well. Cover entirely with water, with a couple inches above the bone line to spare. Add in a bay leaf if you have one, and possibly a bouillon cube as a bit of a starter, and salt generously. Cover and cook. In a regular pot you have to cook for HOURS (and you probably want to smash up the bones with a hammer or something so they release their flavor a bit easier). However, I have a pressure cooker. Hence, I can just pressure cook the pot for about 45 minutes to an hour, and it's gonna be as good as it's gonna get! Once that's done, simply strain the soup thoroughly - first to get rid of the bones, then through a finer strainer to get rid of any small particulates which may have slipped through. Apparently fine restaurants strain their stocks up to 5 times to get them extra smooth, through increasingly finer strainers, but I generally don't go that far. Any sort of bones work here - as I've said, I've made turkey soup, duck soup, chicken stock, lamb stock, shrimp stock, and even veggie stock once (I didn't find that veggie stock was worth it, though - I'd have rather just eaten all the veggies and bought veggie stock - the difference from store bought didn't seem significant, except for a bit of a stronger dill flavor, but I digress). You can also make soup out of actual meat - buy a whole chicken and work from there - and that will end up with a delicious pot of soup as well - with actual meat in it to boot. But I rather favor this bone based method, as it's nice not to waste the bones from your lovely chicken roast and to reuse them for new, delicious purposes. It feels thrifty, and it turns out very well.

So in the past few weeks, I've made a couple different soups using my stock base (and yet, still have some remaining in the freezer). First, I made a sort of 'leftover' soup using a bunch of items that I had in my fridge I wanted to get rid of. This ended up consisting of onion/garlic/celery/cream cheese/parmesan cheese/heavy cream/chicken soup/cumin/bay leaf/chili powder/pepper/cayenne pepper/chives/corn starch/MSG/salt/anchovy paste/hot sauce! I don't have a picture, or even a recipe really other than my list of ingredients, because I just kind of kept adding things to the soup, tasting it, and whisking vigorously. So I guess this bit of the post is just a self-reminder and PSA that making soup once you have a good base is pretty easy and flexible. And there aren't any rules about it. Just stick things in that will taste good, and there you have it.

More recently, I decided to make some congee. This is also a relatively recipe-less dish. At it's most basic, it is rice in soup broth, cooked for long enough that the rice breaks down and becomes mush. So it is mainly a question of what you want IN your mush. However, I scandalized Benson by putting onions instead of scallions in my congee (one of these items I had, the other I didn't. The onions taste FINE, but admittedly the scallions are a BIT more traditional...). "Why would you put onions in congee? Nobody does that." I don't recall his EXACT phrasing, but the upshot was I was corrupting one of his favorite dishes, apparently. He also gets on me for putting sugar in my tea. Which is why I don't put sugar in green tea any more (but still keep to my sugared black). Anyway, this is an example of when I like to take full advantage of my slow cooker to just let the soup sit on my counter as everything cooks. So here are the ingredients I put into my most recent batch of congee - again, the only real things you need to put in are rice and broth. And scallions. And perhaps some ginger. And salt.


Congee
1 quart chicken stock+ 4 cups water (aka, 2 quarts soup)
1.5 c. uncooked rice
2 chicken thighs
1/2 diced onion (or, fine, SCALLIONS - ok? I had to promise Benson that if I ever made this for him, I'd only put scallions in.)
Ginger (alas, I only had the ground stuff this time, but I prefer to chop up a few actual chunks/slivers - that's what I tend to do. I usually have it around, but I recently finished off my last hunk.)
Salt
Pepper
MSG (see my post, Cooking For One, if you want to hear my mini-rant on MSG having a bad rep)
Soy Sauce
Maggie sauce
Sesame oil
Jyok3 sung1 - which is shredded... dried... pork stuff? From Chinatown. Added at the end as a kind of garnish, on top of the soup, not cooked with it. Also delicious over straight up rice. Or over other stuff with rice. Or on it's own. Just look at the picture, not really sure how to describe it other than kind of sweetish dried shredded pork.

Shredded dried pork product

I add the bit of water to my soup stock because stock is STRONG, and I added other stuff into it for flavoring, so I can get away with diluting it a bit. It goes further that way. But yes, toss everything in your crockpot, give it a stir, and let it cook for 4-6 hours until the rice has broken down and it's nice and porridge-y. That's when you taste and adjust the seasonings. Obviously, since I tossed in raw chicken, one can't taste until after it's cooked through. But I don't even bother taking the chicken off the bone - just tossing the whole thing on is fine, because after a few hours it falls OFF the bone. So yes, all of the ingredients, save the jyok3 sung1, into the crockpot for 4-6 hours. Stir occasionally. Or in an actual pot, but then you have to keep an eye on it and stir a heck of a lot more often. I mean, I put it in the pot and then watched a movie with Benson. Can't do that with a pot sitting on top of your stove. (We watched Hot Fuzz, which was great. And in case you are wondering how I watched a movie with Benson when he's in England and I'm in New York, we do this by getting the same copy of the movie, shared via Dropbox, getting on Skype, setting up the movie, and counting backwards to hit play at the same time. Then we keep Skype going, and usually IM comments back and forth throughout. It's nice. We do TV shows the same way.)

 So, that's it for now. Hope that this encourages folks to stop and enjoy some delicious, delicious soup. After all, when I was little, soup was my absolute favorite meal of all. I'd eat it almost every day. Nothing wrong with that - it's extremely versatile and a wonderful comfort food.

Cooking for One

My junior and senior year of college, I was in a cooking rotation with two other people: Benson and his roommate, Abe. I'd sometimes eat with the other girls in my house, but my schedule was such that it was more similar to Benson and Abe's schedules (the other two science majors) then it was to the 4 other people residing in my house. So we'd in general grocery shop together and plan meals together, and every third day or so I'd cook. It cut costs, we almost never had leftovers or eat the same thing twice, we all had different recipe banks to go to so things changed up regularly, and on days you cooked, we had deal that you didn't have to do the dishes (Ah, dishes, my old nemesis - I dream of future days when I will have a dishwasher!). The three of us enjoyed each others cooking and meals, but when it came to basic snacks, we had very different tastes. As I've said in previous posts, I really like salt. I tend to salt my foods a little more than others I cook with might - I don't get complaints, in general, I'm just a little heavy handed. And when I want something to snack on, well, I want it to be salty! Popcorn, crackers, pretzels, or whatever. I attribute this to the fact that my parents had a "cracker jar" rather than a "cookie jar" to raid when I was hungry as a child. Abe, on the other hand, was sweet: he had a constant supply of Skittles, Starbursts, soda, and similar. And finally, there was Benson. As salt is to salty and sugar is to sweet, MSG is to umami (savory). Benson is Chinese-American, grew up in San Francisco, and the snacks of HIS choice were the wasabi-coated peas, the shrimp flavored crackers, and, for lack of better description, the crunchy MSG-coated string beans. We joked that we needed a bitter and a sour person to add to our group - but alas, never managed to complete the set. So in addition to the salt and sugar lying around, we also had a shaker of MSG to add to our soups and stir fries for added taste. I rather grew to appreciate it, and still have a shaker around my kitchen, and I certainly don't have a fear of MSG. Such fears, I think, are overhyped - it's really the rare person who reacts badly to it, and it's NOT that bad for you, any more then a bit of salt or a bit of sugar is. In excess, well, sure, but again, so are salt and sugar.

As I've stated before, now that I'm in grad school I generally just cook for myself when I'm in my apartment. When I have a roommate (and I'm currently in between roommates) I will offer food if they're around, but for the most part, food is made just for me. This tends to cut certain dishes out of my repetoire - one's that are just too massive and that I'd have to eat for a week, or foods that would leave me with a lot of leftover fresh vegetables which would spoil before I could eat it all (I almost never buy lettuce, lest I be forced to have salad EVERY DAY until it's gone). One such dish was a regular in college - Chicken with 30 Cloves of Garlic. I'm a huge fan of garlic in general, and a whole chicken is great for when you have a group of people. Usually some people like white meat, and some like dark, so you can generally get the part of the bird you are most fond of (DARK MEAT!). And when you were through, you'd have a chicken carcass and some bones and scraps, which were easy to toss in a bag in the freezer to save for making stock later. In fact, my bone bag was rather a running joke in my college house; it was clearly labeled "Jen's Bones" and the idea was that not only did I make chicken (and turkey, and duck) soup, but  that I was keeping other sorts of bones as well. Our apartment mate Kaila lived in constant terror that we were all trying to fatten her up for "Kaila Soup" (which as you can see that we've still not made, as evidenced by her recent visit!).

Anyway, I've not made Chicken with 30 Cloves of Garlic in several years at this point. But a few weeks ago, I ran into a sale on cornish game hens at the grocery store. Now, these are small birds, not even 2 lbs, so it occurred to me that it was about the right size for me to make for myself, with a few leftovers. And that a cornish hen could probably be cooked in anyway that a full sized bird could be cooked, just by changing the cooking time a bit. So I bought two. One is currently in my freezer, but for the other I used a recipe I found online which is practically identical to my recipe, but using a game hen instead of a chicken, here.



 Chicken with 30 Cloves of Garlic
1 cornish game hen (or more usually, a whole chicken!)
30+ cloves of garlic (roughly 1.5 heads)
3 tbs olive oil
1/3 cup chicken stock (or 1 cup for a whole chicken)
1/3 cup white wine (1 cup for a whole chicken)
1 lemon, quartered
salt, pepper, rosemary (preferably, but not necessarily, fresh)



The recipe itself is simple. Rub the bird with olive oil, then sprinkle with salt, pepper, and rosemary. You can also mince a clove or two of garlic and rub the bird with that as well. Put a quarter of a lemon and some seasoning into the cavity of the bird (along with the organs, if it came with them... delicious liver, neck, heart, and giblets! I actually quite enjoy these parts, though some people do not.). Then put the bird in a roasting pan, and toss the garlic all around it.

While I peeled the garlic, you don't actually need to - I've made it before without doing so, and if you cut off the bottom before cooking the garlic, you can just squeeze it once it's cooked and it pops out the end. But I actually find it kind of relaxing to peel garlic once in a while, so I went for it anyway - it's easier to eat that way! It doesn't make a huge difference either way. And if I'm being honest, I didn't use 30 cloves of garlic - I only had 27 available, alas! But I think that's close enough, don't you?

Next, baked your game hen at 425F for 25 minutes. Mix the wine and chicken stock, and after those 25 minutes, turn down the heat to 350F, pour the liquid over the bird, and cook for another 35, basting every 10 minutes or so. For a full chicken, well, it depends on the weight, but I'd do a similar temperature changing so you can get the crisp skin. But it will then be much longer baking in the second part, because... size. Once your bird is cooked (judging by a meat thermometer, and when the juices run clear when you cut it), you can remove it from the oven and carve it up to serve. For the game hen, this meant that I cut it in half lengthwise with my kitchen shears and ate half of it, saving the rest for the next days' lunch. Half a game hen was just about the right amount for one, especially with veggies for a side. For a chicken, obviously, carve it like you would any other chicken.

You can just use the juices as a sauce, at this point, but I wanted something a little thicker and saucier, so I strained out the garlic and other particulates and cooked it down a bit in a sauce pan. I thought it needed a little more flavor, so I added a little bit of salt, msg, lemon juice (a few drops) and apple cider vinegar to brighten it up a bit! I've read numerous places that adding a bit of acidity can really improve a dish, and it turned out very nicely here, especially considering I improvised the additions! So overall, I would call this a very successful adaptation, and I would happily get game hen as a replacement for whole chicken again in the future. Since cooking for one can be a bit aggravating at times, it's always nice to find a good way to moderate my serving sizes and open up my repertoire a bit!