The Simplest Stock

Ok, I know as a devoted cook, I'm not supposed to say this, but I'm going to... making stock from scratch is a pain in the neck. Every cookbook presents it as so easy, chefs talk about the importance of having a great stock and how simple it is to have it just simmering away in the background all day.

And I did try for a few years. I was uncompromising in my belief that soup could only be made with the perfect stock, following the perfect process. Every month or so, I'd lovingly tend a huge pot of chicken scraps and vegetables for 8 hours until the bones fell to pieces (to extract every molecule of gelatin, naturally). I'd pack the freezer with little containers of the resulting magic liquid.

And it was good. Really, so very good....

But easy? No way.

First of all, how do you cool a big pot of boiling liquid quickly enough to not risk bacterial growth? I used to go buy big bags of ice so that I could strain the stock into a pot sitting in a sinkful of ice. Not exactly easy. After you strain the stock, you've got a hot greasy mess of meat and veg to deal with. Also a pain. And I never had enough of the right scraps or enough containers or enough space in the freezer. Even the recipes I have for vegetable stock are a little excessive, calling for tons of ingredients, pre-roasting the vegetables, etc, etc.

So after a few years, I gave up and started (reluctantly) buying boxed stock. It doesn't taste good, is expensive and creates container waste, but seriously, I needed stock frequently and never seemed to have it on hand.

Around this time (last year), I started cooking with spring onions, garlic and shallots from the local farmers market. I had little experience with using these huge, stringy plants. For example, I bought walking onions and elephant garlic that were both about 2-3 feet in length. I'd cook with the white part of the plant, use the middle light green part as a garnish, but could never figure out what to do with the long dark green ends. With the best of intentions, I saved piles of scraps in the fridge that I knew were ultimately destined for the trash.

So these two circumstances came together one fateful night. I was making risotto, which absolutely needs good stock, and I didn't have any, homemade or storebought, and I didn't have time to go buy it. I looked up a recipe for vegetable stock, but I didn't have the time, nor did I have half the ingredients. So... I improvised. I grabbed a ton of the aforementioned scraps out of the fridge, threw them in a pot and boiled them for 45 minutes (the exact time it took me to prepare the ingredients for the risotto and start them cooking). The stock was pretty good, I had expended no extra time, and the resulting risotto tasted great!

Since then, I've been experimenting and have completely changed my attitude to stock. I save every vegetable scrap in bags in the freezer. Leek ends are like gold. To think I used to throw them away. For shame! Those leaves that come on the ends of celery? Precious, throw 'em in a bag.

So now I don't buy stock, and I don't make it ahead of time. If I'm missing some ingredients, that doesn't bother me either because I know I've got enough diverted compost scraps to make something good. I know that it is not as good as lovingly made chicken stock, but that only matters if the chicken stock exists. And it is much better than store-bought.

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The Simplest Stock

Some or all of the following ingredients...

• Handful of green ends of any variety of spring garlic, or 2 cloves of garlic, unpeeled
• Handful of green ends of any variety of spring onions or shallots, or 1 onion, unpeeled, cut in half
• Handful of green ends of leeks
• 2 carrots, broken in half
• 2 stalks of celery, broken in half
• a few sprigs of thyme
• a few sprigs of parsley
• 2 bay leaves
• 5 peppercorns
• a few dried mushrooms, if you're making something that calls for mushrooms or something with a richer, earthy taste (like a winter minestrone soup). For lighter soups, leave these out.

Throw everything in a large saucepan of cold water. Bring to a boil and simmer for 45 minutes.

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Oh, and thinking about that green garlic (the picture is from last year, it isn't in season yet), 4 weeks until the farmer's market reopens. Hooray!

Quick, Easy Groat Oatmeal

The last two times I've gone to the supermarket, I've noticed a peculiar thing in the bulk foods aisle. Three different people hanging around the oat bins looking confused. One of them asked me if I knew what the difference was between rolled oats and quick-cook oats. (Did I ever!!) I overheard another asking an assistant, "My wife wants me to buy oats for her morning oatmeal, what kind do I buy?"

So why all the confusion? Well, because the bulk aisle at Whole Foods actually sells four different kinds of oats. According to King Arthur, the differences are:

• Oat groats - the most unprocessed form of the grain that is still edible. The whole grain with the outer husk removed.
• Steel cut (also known as Irish or Scottish) - Oat groats that have been cut into a few pieces for faster cooking time.
• Rolled - Oat groats that have been steamed and rolled flat. These can be eaten raw or cooked. They are commonly used in muesli, granola and oatmeal cookies.
• Quick cook - Oat groats that have been cut into pieces, steamed and rolled flat.

Wait, wait, wait - why am I talking about oats? Isn't this post supposed to be about oatmeal?

Because the oats matter. You can't make a great bowl of oatmeal (I will get to it eventually) without the right oats. This bowl of steaming goodness will start your day off right and won't taste anything like the paste that results from dumping a bag of instant oatmeal into a cup of boiling water. Ok, wait, the oats.

Oat groats and steel cut oats taste nutty and have a creamy, silky texture while retaining a little bite. They really, really are so good. And, no matter how long you cook them, they don't get sticky as does oatmeal made from rolled or quick cook oats.

Before we go any further, please think back to all the bad oatmeal you've ever had. My sisters and I had to cook my own before school when I was a kid, and the single word that comes to mind is glue.

With oatmeal, taste really matters. Great, so why not eat groats every morning?

Unfortunately, the less processed an oat is, the longer it takes to cook. Oat groats and steel cut oats require anywhere from 40-60 minutes. Rolled oats require about 10 and quick cook require about 5.

BUT… I have discovered the secret to eating better oats with less work. With only the tiniest bit of forethought, you too can have delicious oatmeal without having to wait for an hour to eat.

Oh! And I forgot to mention toppings. As much as I love oatmeal, it does get a little boring every weekend. You can add textural and taste variety by experimenting with various seasonal toppings throughout the year. Since it's winter, this version makes use primarily of dried fruits and nuts
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Better Winter Oatmeal

• Oat groats or steel cut oats - 1/3 c. per serving
• Pinch of salt
• Pinch of cinnamon
• Toppings: dried apricot, prunes, raisins, nuts
• Maple syrup
• Milk

The night before (here is the tiny bit of forethought part)...

Step 1: Place oats in a saucepan with a pinch of salt.
Step 2: Put on the kettle
Step 3: Go brush your teeth.
Step 4: When the kettle boils (conveniently right around the time you finish brushing your teeth), pour boiling water over the oats at a ratio of 3 parts water to 1 part oats. Put the lid on. Go to bed.

The next morning…

Bring the oats back to a boil, cover and reduce to a simmer. Cook for 10 minutes. During this time prepare your toppings. Add the cinnamon to the oatmeal. Cut up the apricots and prunes and add them to the oatmeal pan to soften for a few minutes. Gently toast the nuts in a pan, coarsely chop and set aside.

When the oatmeal is cooked, stir in the raisins and nuts.

Serve the oatmeal with all the toppings mixed in, drizzled with pure maple syrup and a little milk.

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Have I convinced you yet? I wasn't able to convince the woman at Whole Foods (she walked off about 200 words ago) but that isn't going to stop me from continuing to try to spread the word. I'm sure there will be another unsuspecting passerby perusing the oats this very weekend.

What You Get from a CSA that You Can't Get in the Supermarket

This year my family purchased a Fall Keeper CSA share from Abbondanza Farms for the second time. The Keeper share is a little different from the more popular summer CSA share. You only get five drops, at a pretty high cost per drop, but each drop is a big box of storable fall vegetables. The idea is that by over-purchasing from the late fall harvest, you'll be able to continue eating local produce through most of the winter. See my previous posts on CSAs and the Fall Keeper Share to learn more.

As the summer produce dwindled, I started planning (and craving) what I would cook with the first pick-up. I remembered the quality of last year's beets, winter squash, fingerling potatoes, and I couldn't wait. The summer CSA (from the same farm) had ended two weeks earlier, so my cupboards were pretty bare. I hadn't bought anything at the supermarket because I knew I had a bountiful box of food coming.

As I eagerly drove up on Thursday, the usual pickup day, I was perplexed to find the parking lot empty. I slowly realized that I'd gotten confused. Thursday had been the pickup day all summer, but I'd received an email earlier in the week notifying me that the pickup day for the fall share was Wednesday. Ohhh noooo….

I was so disappointed. How could I have spaced this out? How was I going to get my veggies? What was I going to cook for dinner that night?

So I called the farm, explained my situation, groveled, begged, and sure enough… no problem, I could come get the share at the farm that weekend. Great! When I arrived, they didn't seem bothered at all. In fact, it appeared from the stack of boxes set aside that I may not have been the only person to have gotten confused.

I definitely wasn't going to forget again. Especially since the next share was a double pick-up of veggies right before Thanksgiving. How exciting!

Two weeks pass by. Every day I remind myself… don't forget the veggies on Wednesday.

The day arrived, and what a crazy day it was. That morning, my son got sick, so I stayed home from work to snuggle with him. I also received a call from a family member asking if I could help take an elderly relative to the hospital the next day. And, I was busy thinking about a business trip I had to make to India in a few weeks. To say I was a little frazzled was an understatement. At eight PM that night, it suddenly dawned on me that it was THE pickup day, the one I wasn't going to forget, and it was one hour after they closed. ARRRGGGGHHHH!

I was so upset. How could I have done this again? After a few minutes I came to my senses. I have too much going on. Yes, it's a lot of money that I spent and am going to have to spend to buy the food I didn't get, but I've got too much to worry about. Besides, while they were very nice last time, I just couldn't stomach the thought of admitting again that I was so disorganized. I decided to forget it.

A few days later, I received a phone call from the woman that runs the program. She had noticed from the checklists that I hadn't shown up for either of the first two pick-ups and was concerned that they hadn't properly communicated the schedule and location to me. I was so surprised and moved that someone would go to this trouble; everything came rushing out. My voice starting choking up as I told her about the troubles of my week and that I had just been too embarrassed to call again. Finally, I sighed, "I know this is silly, that it's just food, but I was so looking forward to those veggies." She cut in, "It's not just food. It's important. I'm so sorry to hear about all of this. We'll absolutely get you your share if we have to drop it on your doorstep." We talked about 20 minutes more. She shared a little with me about her family. She asked more about mine. And we talked about the farm and the food that really did mean a lot more to me than I was willing to admit.

So that day I got my veggies and a very welcome personal connection.

There are many well-advertised benefits of joining a CSA: fresh, varied, high quality produce, eating organically, supporting a local business, lower carbon footprint from eating locally grown food.

Here's one more...

The community supported part of the term Community Supported Agriculture means that you're not just supporting a community farm, they're supporting you. I'm pretty sure I've never seen that on sale for $.99/lb at Sunflower Farmer's Market.

Why do we eat what we eat?

As I've become more committed to purchasing and consuming local, organic food, I've found myself wondering what is the "right" food system - one that is environmentally sustainable and provides everyone with affordable access to nutritious food. In the search for easy answers, it is easy to assume that the food industry and the politics it influences are the villains in our current system because they control our choices to the extent that making healthy, responsible choices is unrealistic. This is the view hypothesized by Raj Patel in Stuffed and Starved. He presents the global food system as one in which consumers have very little choice and in which they would certainly make healthier and more responsible choices given the opportunity.

I really want to believe this last part, but I do sometimes have doubts…

One reason, and the theme of this post, is that I frequently find my food choices to be very different than those of people around me, despite the fact that we have access to the same food and the same information. I would really like to know why. For instance, why does anybody ever drink soda, when it is so obviously bad for you?

In an attempt to understand, and be more open minded about, the causes of these differences, I started thinking about what might be the factors that influence someone making food choices:

• Taste pleasure derived from a particular food
• Familiarity
• Cooking skills
• Time
• Income
• Food cost
• Food nutritional value
• Understanding of nutritional information
• Available selection
• Growing source and method
• Understanding of environmental impact of the growing source and method
• Subconscious influences, such as marketing
• Personal politics

Over which of these factors does the individual have control? Are the factors over which we don't have control so overpowering that it is naive to think that people really have choices?

For instance, if heavy marketing of soda makes it seem familiar, this probably increases the likelihood a person will purchase it, despite the fact that he or she had no control over being exposed to that marketing.

Perhaps an effective way to design a better food system would be to identify the factors over which an individual does not have control and work to give the individual more choice in these factors. One example would be to assume that the choice of whether or not to purchase local food is dominated by it's affordability, which is out of an individual's control, so to work with local governments to make policy changes that make local food more affordable.

Postscript -
Sorry that post ended rather abruptly because I sort of forgot my original point. Was it this? ... I usually attribute people's food choices to personal taste, cost, convenience and vastly differing levels of concern about the environment and nutrition, but am I overlooking other differences, ones out of our control, that exist even for people living in the same town?

What did I conclude? Nothing, except that in keeping with my usual habits, I've made a list of topics to investigate.

Anyway...
Happy New Year!

'Tis the season for resolutions and new beginnings, so you'll be seeing more of Boulder Home Cook!

Lollipops and Beer

While you may hear about how hard it is for small businesses to survive, there is one small business that is never going away: the local liquor store. Why?

LOLLIPOPS

Yea, you read that right. Lollipops.

Those of you without kids have probably never noticed the small bucket of DumDums next to the cash register (at every liquor store in Boulder, is it just a Boulder thing?). Even if you have, it probably didn't occur to you that it is a brilliant marketing strategy.

My son was about one when they started asking casually, "Does he want a lollipop? Still a bit young? Maybe next time."

I resisted for a long time. After all, I didn't want him eating candy/corn syrup/anything before dinner. Or worse ... would he know what to do with it? What if he bit the candy off the stick (choking paranoia scene plays in my head).

Around his 2nd birthday, I caved. "He's been so sweet today. Everyone likes a lollipop now and then, it can't hurt anything." Little did I realize how amazing is the memory of a two year old for the taste of lollipops, the word lollipop, the word beer and the direction of the liquor store down the street.

Life has changed a little since then. The first words out of his mouth in the morning are, "Lollipops and beer?" When I pick him up at day care, he doesn't say, "Go home, see daddy?" anymore, but rather "Lollipops and beer?" If we go for a walk, he pulls and pulls on my hand to head towards, you guessed it, Lollipops and Beer.

It's hard enough to resist having a beer on a Tuesday night. It's even harder when your kid has a vested interest in you buying beer. Like I said, brilliant.

It wouldn't be so bad if he didn't say it in public. It's incredibly embarrassing, especially in Boulder. I mean, what kind of parents are we, giving our kid lollipops on a Tuesday night?

I Can't Make Marshmellows

The July Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Nicole at Sweet Tooth. She chose Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Cookies and Milan Cookies from pastry chef Gale Gand of the Food Network.

After that intro, you may be wondering why I don't have a mouth-watering picture of chocolate-dipped marshmallow cookies. Or perhaps you were expecting crispy delicate Milanos. The answer is quite simple ... there aren't any.

How exactly did this experiment go down? I decided to go for the harder, more interesting, cookie: the mallows.

I knew things were going awry when I couldn't roll the dough to 1/8 inch. It was warm here, and the dough started to melt. I did improvise my way out of the mess by rolling the sticky dough into logs, freezing and then cutting off thin slices. I have to admit that I was a little puzzled as to how a recipe for approximately two dozen cookies yielded over 100, but I decided to push onward.

The marshmallows. Geez, from reviewing the posted pictures, I must be the only Daring Baker that can't make marshmallows, but there is absolutely no doubt that mine were a failure. When I attempted to mix the hot sugar syrup with softly whipped egg whites, the whole thing immediately deflated, leaving me with a sticky, sugary, egg white mess. This went the only place it could, down the drain.

I debated dipping my tiny, naked cookies in chocolate, but at this point I was batting so low, I thought I probably shouldn't waste the chocolate.

Not every daring challenge can be a success. Maybe next time!

Easy Summer Salad - Peaches, Almonds and Brown Rice

Inspired by the recent Mark Bittman article 101 Simple Salads for the Season, today I invented a summer salad of my own. While I can't remember every combination in Bittman's long list, I'm pretty sure that this combination is original.

Like most experimental successes, this one sprang from a combination of desperation and what meager ingredients I had in the fridge.

Desperation: What to give a two year old for lunch? I know it is a healthy meal, but as a responsible parent, I don't think I should give my son whole wheat penne mixed with chopped tomato and drizzled with olive oil for the 100th time in a row. I'll do rice instead. Now I just need to add something fresh.

What's in the fridge? Peaches from the farmer's market. Hmmm, peaches and rice sound a little weird, but here we go!

By the way, this salad is so easy to make, that I'd recommend waiting to prep the fruit and vegetables until after the rice has cooked. From that point, it should take about 10 minutes.

Peach, Almond and Brown Basmati Rice Salad

• 1 c. brown basmati rice
• 2 c. + 2 Tbs. water
• handful beet greens or other dark greens, washed and thinly sliced
  
• 2 spring onions or scallions, washed and thinly sliced
  
• handful almonds, toasted in a pan on low heat for a few minutes, then coarsely chopped
  
• 2 peaches, diced
  
• salt, pepper, white wine vinegar and olive oil, to taste
  

Bring water to a boil in a small saucepan, add the rice, then cover and reduce the heat to low. Cook for 45 minutes. Turn off the heat and let the rice stand, covered, while you prepare the fruit and vegetables.

Put the sliced greens and onions into the rice pan and re-cover for a few minutes so they wilt.

Add the peaches and almonds to the rice. Drizzle with vinegar and olive oil to taste, then check for salt and pepper.