Soup Stock for the People

Making soup stock is kind of my favorite thing. It makes for a sorta special event in my house. I do it once or twice a month, which aids in cleaning out the fridge and my very soul. I go through a whole mental inventory process that is mostly helpful, but tinged with loss and grief and sadness. One of my best girlfriends, with whom I am no longer close, taught me to make stock. So like it or not, every time I go through this process, or use the final product, I remember her and the friendship we no longer really share, and I grieve the loss of my friend a little. But, in addition to that grief, there exists a balancing force in remembering the joy we shared, and in the idea that although I guess we have moved on in our lives, her influence and spirit will always stay with me. And I like that a lot. From that, I take with me the idea of salvaging the good out of a thing, which is a direct parallel to making my own soup stock from scratch.

To me, making soup stock is nothing short of alchemy. You take the gross parts of all the old shit you don’t want anymore and boil them down into a flavory explosion of infinite possibilities. I don’t really do it to save money on buying store-bought stock, although it is a happy coincidence, as much as I do it to add another layer of flavor to my soups, sauces and even tacos. I still buy and use the store bought stuff. Nothing really replaces that delicious boxed “chicken” flavor. But making stock consumes time, requires intensive labor, and makes your whole house smell like – hrm, let’s see, which ethnic group can I co-opt into this metaphor to my greatest possible use at their greatest possible expense (because everybody knows I love a good marginalizing) – you know how some people say that Slavs and Gypsies smell like soup? Well, if you are making soup stock and you go outside to take out the trash or get the mail or whatever, and you come back in, the very first thought in your brain will be Holy Shit! It smells like a truckload of Slavs in here, which can either be totally soothing or a little creepy and uncomfortable, depending on your exposure to travelling circus carnival midway workers as a child. Alright, that’s probably enough sad and semi-ironic racist shit for this blog episode. But never fear! I am sure there will probably be plenty of both in pretty much every post yet to come. Delicious Ironing!

Sometimes you're just left holding a bag of shit.

Anyhoo, the basic idea is that you get yourself a gallon sized Ziploc Freezer Bag, which shall become your tried and trusted friend throughout all of your cooking endeavors. Anytime you chop an onion, put the skins and the root and end into your Ziploc. Garlic? Skins and roots and eyes into the Ziploc. Carrots? Scrub ‘em off good, then skin them with a veggie peeler and place them skins and root ends into your damn Ziploc. Celery stalks looking a little limp and you have no desire to eat them whatsoever, and to be quite honest, you weren’t gonna eat them shits even from the moment you bought and paid for their pristine asses at the grocery store? Chop them and their leaves into the bag. Left over sautéed carrots even the dog refused? Into the Ziploc. Thyme or Sage you bought for that one fucking chicken soup recipe so now you have 800 sprigs and no possible use? Into the bag. Anything in the onion, garlic, shallot or scallion family, save every part you don’t eat. Bell peppers work great too. I don’t use potatoes in my stock, because potatoes can add too much starchy something or other to the water. Also, potatoes suck out the salt and flavor of the chicken. Or possibly I invented that entirely, for no particular reason. When your Ziploc is full (about 2 weeks for me) the time has arrived to get crazy on the microphone.
 

You had a good run, bird.

Most chicken stock recipes call for you to go to the store and purchase literal POUNDS of wings and giblets and gizzards and all manner of gnarly shit I don’t like, roast them on a special “roasting” pan (as if) and do a bunch of other stuff. I find that to be silly. As previously mentioned, I occasionally like to purchase a whole baked chicken with the skin still on it at the grocery store. After removing the breasts and thighs and surrounding not-too-icky meats, the remaining carcass and wings make for a fantastic chickeny base for your soup stock. You can totally go buy a pallet of wings and drummies, but Christ, then you’re just giving the grocery store what they want.

Not a picture of Bay Leaves at all.

Additionally, let’s talk about Bay Leaves. I would say that I have probably made 40,000 recipes this year so far. Approximately 39,500 have called for Bay Leaves, and I, being a dummy, didn’t include the Bay Leaves because I didn’t own any. I just assumed that they weren’t all that important and people who include a fucking bay leaf in their recipe directions are just try-hards and probably in the pocket of Big Bay Leaf. Then I needed some other madras this or smoked paprika that for something else, and while I was in the spice aisle, I said, alright fine, you win, Bay Leaf-Industrial Complex. I will purchase one stupid bottle of stupid leaves and actually use them as intended in my soups and stuff. Now, I would put bay leaves in my morning coffee if it didn’t adversely affect my gout so badly. If you ask me, bay leaves were invented for soup stock and I apologize to all the soups and soup stocks I have ever made that did not include them. Never again. Never forget.

Finally, a word about equipment. Part of the awesome part of making soup stock is figuring out how to do it using what you have on hand. You will for sure need a giant stock pot, a couple or three large containers (one of them with a lid) and a couple of straining devices. I have a medium-fine strainer and a tiny super fine strainer (which doubles awesomely as a powdered sugar dusting sieve thing) that team up to make one awesome ambiguously gay duo of straining power. So, I encourage you to open up all those low and high cabinets and dig around and locate all those weird ass 5 gallon Tupperwares you must have inherited with the house, rummage up the bizarro strainer with the weird vegetables drawn in 1964 on the handle and get ready for some mad science.

Shizz Besides the Basics:
Large stock pot

Slotted spoon

Medium strainer

Fine Strainer

Large container with lid


Ingredients:
3 to 5 quarts of water

2 bay leaves

½ teaspoon salt

8 to 10 whole peppercorns

Chicken carcass + wings

Leftovers from the Bourgeois Kit to Healthy Living.

(What just happened to be in my Ziploc this time): leeks, carrot peels and ends, tops and roots and skins of green onions, yellow sweet onions, and red onions, a bunch of thyme, ¼ of a Serrano pepper, celery stalks and leaves, bunch of sage, 2 chicken bones from dinner out (Yes, it’s true, I get my bones to-go in a doggie bag to supplement my soup stocks because I like to use the whole buffalo), garlic skins and eyes and bruised or generally weirdy bulbs.

Order of Operations:
1. Set your stove on about 6 or 7 and fill up your stock pot about halfway with water (3 to 4 quarts).

In the hot tub, poppin' bubbly.

2. Add peppercorns and salt.

3. Slowly slide in your gross chicken carcass and any skin or meat or bones that tried to escape. Make sure you have removed the elastic bungee that, more than likely, was twisted round your bird tighter than the new Radiohead album.

4. Bring your stock pot to a boil, reduce heat to maybe 4 ½ or 5, enough to keep a gentle rolling boil to the water, and cook for about an hour or until your Spidey-sense tells you the bird has had enough.

What out for the face suckers, too.

5. Remove stock pot from heat and, using your slotted spoon, skim 90 to 95% of the bones and meat flotsam out and discard.

Post-modern trash transmutation.

6. Add bay leaves and contents of Ziploc Freezer Bag to stock pot chicken water.


7. Add enough water to bring your stock pot back up to about half full. See there, jerks? I said half full not half empty. I guess all that mainlining of Prozac directly into my eyeball is finally starting to pay off :)

Rubbing ya spot love, got ya screaming Punish Me.

8. Bring your veggies and water back up to a gentle boil, slap a lid on your stock pot if you can remember where you put it, and then boil it up for at least one hour, but probably not much more than 2 hours. Basically, until you have to go run errands or pay attention to your family, or do whatever shit you probably have been procrastinating against by doing this little cooking project in the first place.



9. When time is up, remove your pot from the heat and let it cool off for 20 to 30 minutes, so as not to burn your fool hands off while handling it.

10. Whilst you are waiting for your shit to cool, set up your crime lab in your kitchen sink, or another place where you can get messy and splashy. My lab consists of one 4-Cup measuring cup, one big ass Tupperware, and one big ass metal bowl and my 2 strainers. But like I said, it’s fun to figger out what you already have that can satisfy your needs. Ifyouknowwhatimsayin.

Make stock, not meth. Or at least stock AND meth.

11. Once your shit has chilled out enough to be easily handled (lol yah right) then do your first pass at straining. Basically, you pour shit from one container to another, through a sieve, about 20 times or until there are no longer any grody chunks or serious sediment hanging out. So, begin by setting up your bigger strainer over your large measuring cup and pour off most of the liquid from your stock.

This used to be part of Pee Wee's Automatic Breakfast Machine.

12. Pour what’s in your measuring cup through your fine strainer into your big ass Tupperware and then go back to your stock pot full of limp and boiled veggie parts. Using your slotted spoon, scoop one or two heaping spoonfuls of veggiestuffs into your medium strainer, placed back over your empty measuring cup.

Women always be draining essences and discarding.

13. Then use the back of your slotted spoon to mash any and all precious drops of stock liquid out of your veggies. Once they stop giving up the ghost, scoop out your dry and mashed veggieguts into your big garbage bowl. Repeat process until you get all the way through your stock pot, or until your measuring cup fills up again, then empty it thru the small strainer, into your big Tupperware with the rest of the strained stock.

14. This all sounds weird because I am writing it out in words, but I swear it is fairly intuitive and mostly impossible to fuck up, so just jump right in there and start pouring and splashing around with the intent of isolating the flavor water from the boiled out veggie parts and sediment.

15. OK. You’ve emptied your stock pot. You’ve filled your garbage bowl. You’ve topped your Tupperware. Here’s what’s up now: soap out your stock pot so that no fat solids or veggie shits remain. Using your finest (meaning the one having the smallest of holes in it, not the one what looks like Vivica A. Fox) strainer, pour the Tupperware into the stock pot. Next, soap out your Tupperware and pour out your stockpot, thru the fine strainer, back into your Tupperware. Do this until you are reasonably sure you have removed as much sediment and fat as you can without going totally OCD freakout on it. Make sure all the stock is back in the Tupperware when you decide you are done with this shit for now. Slap the lid on your stock and somehow manage to find room in your fridge for it.

16. Forget about that shit until tomorrow. Whisper words of wisdom to it and let that mother be.

Why liposuction is gross.

17. 8 to 24 hours later, pull that Tupperware out da fridge and witness the miracle of fat separation that has magically occurred right there in your own goddamn kitchen. There should be some gnarly chicken fat chillin’ right on top of your stock, exactly where you want it.



  

Losing fat is all the rage.

18. Use your slotted spoon to skim and scoop out as much of the fat as possible and discard it.

Super-fine and full of holes. Also pictured, a sieve.

19. Retrieve your stock pot from your dish rack and begin another round of back and forth pouring and straining with your fine mesh strainer until you can no longer see fat solids hanging out in the mesh of your sieve. Oops I forgot to tell you that it is probably not only beneficial, but doggone necessary to rinse out your fine mesh strainer between each pour. The fat solids collect super quickly, and negatively affect your strainer’s ability to do its god-given duty. So keep an eye on that.

20. So right about now you should have a big old batch of approx 2 to 4 quarts of soup stock. Separate them out into servings of 2 cups or 4 cups or 14 oz or whatever you use, and put them in freezer- and microwave-safe containers, then freeze them up or use them at your leisure.

21. This stock will start to be gross and rotten after about a week in your fridge. Use it 50-50 with boxed chicken stock in soups that call for it. I prefer the mix. All one or the other is weirdish, but half and half or 3 to 1 works pretty awesomely in all soups I have thus far tried. Also, if your house is like my house and you have to have tacos at least once a week or the sky will literally fall down upon your pointed little heads, use this stock instead of the water, after you add the taco seasoning to your browned beef. It really makes your tacos savory and flavory and pleasing to all people involved. It also works magnificently in veloute sauces.

22. Congrats, you are awesome and your crisper is cleaned out and you have made culinary gold out of the detritus of your life. I’m real proud of you. Real proud.

Chicken Soup with Parsley Dumplings

Man, is Mercury in retrograde or whatever the hell? Everybody I know has some personal shit swirling around their commode of a universe that just don’t seem to flush. Now that I have opened up this awesome blog post with a pretty disgusting and vibrantly visual poop metaphor, let’s get on to the foods part.

For all my homies in the trenches, I offer a recipe of the utmost comfort food: chicken fucking soup. This is a bastardized recipe that I poached from a Jane Fonda cookbook I bought at a library sale for $1.00 US.  I suppose the honorable thing to do would be to link to the Amazon listing for the book, or to just shove a fistful of greasy dollars into an envelope to be mailed directly to Ms. Fonda, but whatever. It’s rare, actually, that I use a recipe I find as is. I prefer a more researched approach to cooking (meaning I Google “{food name} recipe” and read the first 5 or 8 results and the first 5 or 8 reviews on each result, and then I put together the parts I like from each into a Frankenstein’s Monster recipe that I can rarely duplicate exactly, much to my frustration . Hence, this here shiny blog – a way to remember what the hell I did and do it again a month later. It’s pretty cool I chose to tell you all this parenthetically, because that suggests it’s a personal secret I’m whispering uncomfortably into your weird little ear right now. How’s my coffee breath?).

A note about ingredients before we begin: 

Satisfying my castration fantasies

This recipe calls for a couple of fresh herbs and veggies. It seems that gas is going to cost more than stem cells per gallon soon, and that cutting costs in your food budget is a pretty common sense approach to dealing with that kind of thing. Like “money” or whatever. But fresh snap beans are just SO MUCH FUCKING BETTER than canned green beans, and 9 times out of 10 (I’m looking at you, Oregano) fresh herbs are so so so much better than dried.

Of course you can make those kinds of substitutions and nobody is going to bring a team of Navy Seals to your not very well hidden bunker and shoot your eye out, but you know, they might. Also, I prefer the protein in this soup to be one of those weird heat-lamp whole baked chickens you get in the deli section for like 7 bucks or whatever, for the following reasons: the meat is already a little salty and flavory, it is a ready combination of light and dark meat, and I use the carcass to make soup stock (heeeyoo – could this be foreshadowing for tomorrow’s blog?!?! Stay tuned to this bat channel as the kids say).

Additionally, there is just something really visceral and raw about using your hands to rip all the flesh off an animal. It’s grossly cathartic. I’m not very proud of the sick delight I take in doing this, but I do feel like it keeps me connected to the food I’m putting in my body. So, you can poach or pan sauté or oven bake your own chicken breasts and thighs, or cough up the 7 bux for a weird chicken bird somebody already done cooked. And now, on with the show!

Shizz Besides the Basics:

Hahaha, I don’t know what you even call it. It’s like a skillet and a sauce pan went out behind the roller rink after curfew and did something they both would come to regret and now we have this large skillet with high sides thing. I am sure it has a name. Help me out if you can. Or just look at the pictures below. But anyways you need one of those with a lid.  Also, a slotted spoon helps at the end. And a freaking salad spinner. Did you know that the salad spinner is an amazing tool for washing and drying fresh herbs, in addition to leafy greens?!?!? ME NEITHER until like 10 minutes ago when I figured it out. Le Duh.

Tastes like chicken.

Ingredients:

Soup:

2 cups of cooked chicken (I just go right down the middle and use one whole side of the chicken, minus the wing. No Soup For You, wing!!  (hahaha, that was from Seinfeld, a popular television program from the nineties. )

3 cups store-bought chicken stock

1 cup homemade soup stock (obviously, if you don’t have homemade you can use 4 cups of the store bought shit) Also, the next blog post totally will be about soup stock and my weird feelings regarding such, so keep your mouse-clicking hand and your reading eyes all excited to go to work later in the week on that puppy.

1 cup water

2 bay leaves

1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme

1 teaspoon chopped fresh sage

¼ teaspoon ground black pepper

½ teaspoon of salt, divided

½ to ¾ of an onion, chopped (some onions are HUGE, y’all)

 2 carrots, cut into ¼ to ½ inch slices

Ouch!

8 oz green beans, trimmed – ok for one, not myself nor anybody on the planet knows how much 8 ounces of green beans is. Just grab a coupla handfuls at the grocery and then wash them off, snap their ends off and discard, and snap their bodies into pieces that can fit on a spoon and into your mouth. If you snap a bean and think to yourself, this particular bean is too large to comfortably insert into my anus and smuggle it aboard a commercial aircraft, well then friend, that bean is too large. Once you have approx 1 to 1 ½ cups of these comfortable suppository sized beans, you might be alright. You will know if you have too many once you start adding the beans to the soup. I pity the fool what don’t know an over saturated soup when he see one.

4 oz dried egg noodles (about 1/3 of the package usually, and I use the whole grain Ronzoni Healthy Harvest egg noodles because that’s how I get down).

Clabber Girl was my nickname in high school.

Dumplings:

½ cup unbleached flour

2 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf (Italian) parsley

¾ teaspoon baking powder

1/8 teaspoon ground white pepper

1/8 teaspoon baking soda


1 ½ teaspoons margarine – ok, they don’t even make margarine anymore. I challenge you to find margarine outside of like, South Carolina. I use my tub of Smart Balance hippie flax good for you whatever butter-like stuff. I am sure plain ol’ softened butter would work as well.

¼ cup lowfat buttermilk

1 egg white – or about 1/8 of a cup of Egg Beaters which is essentially egg whites and you don’t have to waste the yolk.

Some tips:

It puts the chicken in the pot. It does this whenever it's told.

This whole process can take about an hour and technically serves 4. Keep your chicken stock box at the ready, because those whole grain noodles just love to suck all the broth outta your soup with the quickness. You will probably add at least another ½ cup along the way. Also, I don’t really understand the difference between stock and broth, so whatever. I have been told, but I can’t be arsed to hold on to that kind of information. Just know that I may say one and mean the other and so it goes and so it goes and so it fucking goes.

Order of Operations:

1. I start with the herbs. I seriously freaking love to de-stem fresh thyme. So rinse your thyme and sage off and salad spin them dry and begin the awesome process of thyme removal. This is one of those great Zen no-mind practices. It takes me about 15 minutes to get a full tablespoon of fresh thyme. I understand that a lot of you have “kids” and “jobs” and “lives” and the idea of spending 15 minutes using your thumb and forefinger to slowly scrape thyme leaves off their stem is probably fucking outrageous and an insult to all the wonderful things you do in your day with your precious, precious time. To me, Thyme is precious, so fuck off. So fill up your tablespoon and then dump it into a little bowl and then chop up your sage and throw it in the same bowl, and now we are off and running.

2. Over medium high heat, set your saucepanskillet down and fill it with the stock(s), water, bay leaves, thyme, sage, black pepper and half the salt. Bring it to a boil. While you wait for the bubbles,

My extra bad ass Porsche knife will straight up CUTCHOO.

3. Wash, peel and slice up them carrots. Chop up your onion. Get snapping on your beans.

4. When you achieve boildom, add the onions, carrots, green beans, chicken and noodles. Return to a boil, reduce your heat, and simmer until you can slip your arm around the carrots in a dark movie and call them “Tenderoni” (about 3 minutes unless you got some serious carrots and then maybe 5).

5. Once all your veggies are in the soup simmering down now, then it’s time to get cracking on some dumplings.

Maybe "Coarse Meal" shoulda been the name of this blog.

6. In a mediumlarge bowl, combine your flour (spooned in and leveled, come on now folks), chopped up parsley (which you can also salad spin. Amazing device.),baking powder, baking soda, remaining salt and white pepper. Add the “margarine” and, using a fork, stir it up and mash it about until the mixture resembles Coarse Meal.

Reminds me of sex ed.

7. In a little bowl, combine the buttermilk and egg beaters and whisk until blended. Guess what you do next. No really guess. Outloud. I CANT HEAR YOU MAGGOT. You got it, you add the milkandegg to the Coarse Meal. And you stir it until it’s blended. Congrats.




 

Don't even offer to share your beer and cracker jacks with them.

8. Take your bowl of dumpling batter and a big ol’ spoon at get over to your soupskilletsaucepan. Carefully, heap about ¼ of the dough into a little plop directly on top of your simmering (bubbles breaking the surface, but not a rolling boil) soup. Try and place them so they are not touching and have room to grow. Pretend that you are my parents and the dumplings are my older sister and cousins and me, and you are making us ride in the back of a pickup truck with a camper lid on it, driving from Houston, Texas to Mt. Ida, Arkansas in the summer heat wave of 1984.Give everybody their own space in a corner and then close the lid up on them and ignore them for the duration.

Puff the Magic Dumpling

9. Simmer, covered, until the dumplings are puffed up and have amazingly experienced the magic of puberty seemingly overnight, or about 12 minutes. Remove and discard the bay leaves because I am pretty sure them shits are poisonous. You might need to stir in some extra stock and/or water at this point. Every time I make this soup, I leave the heat too high because of my shite attention span, and it gets almost bone dry.

10. To serve, (I was gonna try and make like a “you got served” dance off South Park episode reference joke here, but it never materialized and that shit is triflin’ anyways, so) use your slotted spoon to scoop out one dumpling and place it in your favorite bowl. Use the same slotted spoon to scoop out soup guts and place them sorta around the dumpling. Then ladle out the broth and pour overtop the whole business. Repeat for as many folks as you want to feed, up to four (sorry, grandma).

11. Congratulations, you just made the hell out of Jane Fonda soup.

12. This soup has about 380 calories and 4g of fat per serving, if you care about that sort of thing. Not too shabby.