Easy chicken stock

Flavorful, frugal and lowfat, homemade chicken stock adds special taste without salt and artificial additives. My freezer always has containers of stock and of ingredients waiting to become stock.

The most exciting part to me about making stock at home is that it re-uses ingredients from other dishes. Just keep freezer bags or plastic containers with bones from roasted chickens and trimmings of vegetables in your freezer and add to them (keep the vegetables separate from the bones). The best vegetable trimmings are the ends of carrots, the tops of celery, the washed tops of leeks, the stems of parsley and the ends of summer squashes (minus the hard stem). Cookbook author Crescent Dragonwagon recommended adding apple peels to stock, and I've done that with good results too.
If you're in no mood to keep vegetable trimmings, just make simple stocks with the bones only.

I used to leave a stock pot on the stove all afternoon a few times a year, but I found a way to make stock that requires even less attention to the pot: use the slow cooker (aka Crock-Pot).

Fill a slow cooker with bones. Cover all the bones with water, put the lid on the slow cooker and cook on the low setting about eight or ten hours. After about four or five hours, add vegetable trimmings and a couple cloves of garlic if desired. If I'm cooking stock overnight, I have no desire to set an alarm clock for four hours later to add veggies, so I just make the bones-only stock if I'm not awake while it's cooking.

If you forget about the stock and cook longer than 10 hours, the more the bones and connective tissues dissolve, and the more jelly-like the stock will become when it is cooled. This gel is nutritious, containing protein and calcium, and it returns to its liquid state when reheated.

When the stock is finished cooking, put the bones in a mesh strainer over a pot so they will drain. Then toss them out and ladle the stock through the strainer into the pot. Use the ladle so that sediment in the stock stays at the bottom of the slow cooker. Put the pot into the refrigerator overnight to cool. Remove the fat layer the next day and store the stock in plastic containers in the freezer. My favorites are 32-oz yogurt containers because it's a way to re-use what would otherwise be trash, and 4 cups of stock is a convenient quantity to use.

Although I don't make other stocks like beef or veal or fish, I'm sure the only part of this process that would change is a slightly longer cooking time for beef bones and shorter time for fish bones. The same stock process I describe works for turkey carcasses after the holidays, too, or for starting a soup from a ham bone.

Save your food containers and food "waste" for stock, and you get a large quantity of nutritious liquid for the cost of leaving a light bulb on for the day.

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Playing with garden produce: enchiladas

This week's experimental dish was a way to make a large amount of yellow summer squash flavorful.
The contents:
three medium yellow squashes, peeled (they had tough peels) and chopped
1 to 2 onions, chopped
1 15-oz can black beans
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
about 16 corn tortillas
6 to 8 oz crumbled queso fresco
assorted garden peppers (poblano, jalapeño, banana, bell), chopped
cumin and Penzey's Spices Adobo Seasoning to taste
salt and pepper
22 oz can enchilada sauce (I found a red sauce that was all chiles and no tomatoes at the grocery store -- score!!)


Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Saute the onions and carrots till tender, then add the squash and peppers. When vegetables soften, stir in the spices and beans and cook a until beans are heated through, stirring. Spoon squash filling into corn tortillas, sprinkle some cheese onto filling, roll into cylinders and place seam side down in a baking dish. Pour enchilada sauce over all tortillas, spread it around to cover all. Bake until sauce is bubbling.

Upon tasting, Andrew and I found out that the hot queso fresco squeaks like cheese curds but does not melt and does not have much flavor. I might have preferred quesadilla cheese or monterey jack. This recipe made enough for six people and it keeps well as leftovers. Many thanks to Laura for asking me to look after her garden for a week in exchange for all the produce that ripened during that time.

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This is a corn fungus. Instead of throwing it out, I ate it for lunch.

Sitting on my cutting board here in nice little slices is huitlacoche, or corn smut. It's a fungal disease that happens to corn kernels, turning them into giant gray bulbous mushrooms instead of tightly packed rows of yellow kernels. It's not considered a problem so much as an alternate food source to our Mexican neighbors, and they introduced the idea to Americans.
More info about huitlacoche and a scarier-looking photo available at http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/Articles/Mexican-Ingredients-1032/huitlacoche.aspx
I'm sure it's easy to come by here in Illinois corn country, but I've only seen one seller of huitlacoche so far, the person I talked to at the Bloomington Farmer's Market who sold me a little clump for a dollar.

My plan: cut it in slices, saute it and add it with some sauteed zucchini to a quesadilla.

The result: my huitlacoche did not live up to its vaunted reputation for truffle-like smoky goodness. Maybe there wasn't enough, maybe I didn't use the correct method for cooking it, maybe the batch I had was unusually bland, but you know your corn fungus isn't impressive when zucchini has a more pronounced flavor. I found that although there was fungus in every bite of my lunch, it was too subtle for me to notice it most of the time.

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