Remember how easy it is to make your own stock with all those leftover bird parts at this time of year?

I was telling my mom about how thrilling it is making stock, and so she decided to pull out an old recipe that her grandmother used to make. That’s right – my Great Grandma Mary, born in 1900, full-blooded German, hard-working, tough as nails, make everything with lots of butter type of lady.

I don’t remember her much – most of what I know is what has been told. When I was a kid, I mostly remember visiting her in a nursing home. She recognized me less and less, and finally didn’t remember me at all.

But what a great way to remember her – through the kitchen. I think she spent half her life there.

I asked my mom where she think the recipe originated, and she said probably a newspaper or magazine, circa 1940s or 1950s. It was fun to think of that – real food hasn’t changed much in the past century, and it probably won’t even as tastes evolve.

The best part? It is made with wine. I’m a little obsessed with cooking with wine lately (maybe because I can’t have any?). You can’t go wrong with wine. It always turns out good.

Oh and the next best part is that it is super easy.

And the other best part is that it is so versatile – you can substitute any number of the ingredients to suit your tastes.

Are you ready for this?
You need:

• 1 large onion, sliced thinly
• 2 stalks celery, sliced
• 3 T butter
• 6 T flour
• 1 t salt
• 1/4 t pepper
• 8 cups turkey stock or broth
• 2 potatoes cubed (you can peel if you want, but I didn’t)
• 2 carrots, cut into small pieces
• 2 small zucchini cut into strips
• 1 10 oz. package frozen corn (I personally don’t have any 10 oz packages, so I just guessed)
• 1 cup white wine (recipe suggest Chablis)
• 2 cups turkey pieces
• 2 T chopped parsley

In honor of our great nation’s annual massive slaughtering of turkeys, I thought I’d share a recent discovery of mine. Any time you have leftover bones after you’ve eaten the meat, there is a better place for them than stinking up your trash can.

It turns out that instead of buying broth in a box or can, or using bouillon, you can make your own broth/stock. I know that this is not shocking to many of you, but to those of us who are culinarily impaired, this is mind-blowing.

First of all, if you’re like me I bet you’re wondering: what’s the difference between broth and stock, anyway? Does it even matter?

Upon my very trustworthy research throughout the almighty Internet, I haven’t found anything all that conclusive. You know why? Because nobody makes this stuff the same way. There is no worldwide standard for broth with which I can compare the worldwide standard for stock.

In general, though, broth is a bit thinner and stock is a bit more…gelatinous. The reason is that broth is cooked for 1-3ish hours and stock is cooked for your whole life. Or all day. Or at least 4 hours. The longer the bones are cooked, the more time the nutrients and stuff from the bone marrow have to be extracted and gel within the liquid.

Moving on: why bother? Bouillon is more convenient.

I dunno…why bother making anything from scratch? You know exactly what’s going into it, it’s generally healthier, it tastes better, and it’s usually cheaper (particularly if you’re using ingredients that you’re just going to toss out anyway).

Another interesting tidbit I’ve discovered is that bone broth/stock is really really good for you. Why else would you crave chicken soup when you’re sick? The nutrients from the marrow boost your immune system and provide a number of other health benefits for your bones and joints. Go ask a nutritionist.

So how do you make it?

You’ll need:

• Leftover poultry parts and bones like the carcass of a turkey or whole chicken. Include the giblets if you want, but not the liver (the big brown liver-ish thing).
• Carrots
• Onions
• Celery
• Giant pot
• Water

Now do this:

1. Put your bird bones/carcass into your giant pot.

2. Roughly chop up your vegetables and add them to the pot. Generally, for a small chicken (3ish pounds before the meat is taken off), you could use one small carrot, one or two stalks of celery and a small onion. You can include the leaves on the carrots and celery.

For a bigger bird (i.e. Thanksgiving victim), I recently put in two very large carrots, about four stalks of celery and two small onions.

Sorry I’m not more detailed…I’ve just done it a few times and the ratio of vegetables just doesn’t matter that much. Throw in what you’ve got.

You can also add in salt and pepper, but I don’t. Mostly because I forgot once and it didn’t matter…you can add it to recipes later.

3. Cover the bird with cold water and then bring it to a boil.

4. Bring it down to a simmer and let it cook for as long as you can stand it. At least an hour. If you want to, you can do this in a slow-cooker and let it cook all day.

5. Strain the liquid and toss out the bones/meat/veggies. You can use cheese cloth if you really don’t want anything mysterious floating in your broth/stock; a regular strainer also works fine.

Remember that the longer you let it simmer, the more marrow and stuff you’ll extract from the bones (this is a very technical description, I hope you can follow). Your end product will be thicker, but you can always add water. Thus, I think you’re getting more bang for your buck if you let it cook longer.
If you have a turkey, you could end up with about a gallon of stock. Unless you’re making a giant pot of soup out of it immediately, freeze up that stuff for later (for up to about three months). Otherwise, don’t keep the stock refrigerated for more than four days. I like to freeze pre-measured amounts that I can conveniently thaw and use in recipes.

Alternatively, you can make beef stock! I made some after we had steak for my birthday. The recipe is similar; I just added a few peppercorns, a bay leaf, a few cloves and a dash of thyme (thank Betty Crocker; I don’t make this stuff up). Beef bones need to simmer longer — cook them for at least four hours.

So there you have it. Don’t throw away those precious bones. Stock/broth is one of the easiest things you can make, it goes into a ton of recipes (like homemade condensed cream soup substitutes)– and it makes your house smell really good on a brisk autumn day.

Update: I have done this many times now, and these days I put all of my ingredients in a crockpot and let it simmer on high overnight. Easy-peasy.

On my epic quest to become a better cook, I’ve encountered a seemingly insurmountable challenge: homemade bread. There’s incentive for making it, since the store-bought varieties of bread can be laden with high fructose corn syrup and preservatives. And of course homemade is cheaper than fresh bread you could buy at bakeries.

Here’s the problem: it’s not all that easy to bake homemade bread that is good. It either has the wrong texture or the wrong flavor.

Another problem: I cannot do complicated recipes or things that require very much effort. That would just go against everything I represent.

Miraculously, I actually found a recipe that I have made a few times—it is so delicious that I devour most of it before I have the chance to offer it to my children (that might be a slight exaggeration but not much). I got it from my sister-in-law’s friend’s friend’s friend or something like that. It has been adjusted so that it has whole wheat in it—delicious and nutritious.

Here we go.

Ingredients:

• 1 C dry oats
• 2 C boiling water
• 1 T softened butter
• 2 tsp salt
• 1/2 C honey
• 1/2 C lukewarm water
• 2 1/4 tsp dry active yeast (1 package)
• 2 1/4 C bread flour
• 2 1/4 C whole wheat flour
• Extra flour for kneading

Instructions:

• Put the oats in a bowl and pour the boiling water over them. Then go take a nap or something, because you’ll need to wait an hour until they’re nice and mushy.
• Dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm water (about 115 degrees F)—this will take about ten minutes. Note: yeast is very tricky! It needs to be nice and bubbly to work. If it doesn’t get bubbly, toss it out and try a new batch.
• While waiting for the yeast, add the butter, salt and honey to the mushy oats. Stir until blended.
• Stir the yeast water (is that a term?) into the oat mixture. Slowly add the flour until you have a uniform dough. A standing mixer is ideal, but if you’re like The Pragmatist who hasn’t invested in such a luxury yet, you can use your hands. Sticky but fun.
• Cover with a damp towel. Leave in a warm place and let it rise for an hour.
• Remove the dough and knead it for about 10 minutes on a floured surface. Add a little flour at a time as you knead to make the dough easier to handle.
• Shape the dough into one or two loaves and put into one or two buttered bread pans (depending how big you want the bread to be. The Pragmatist likes it either way: two nice and small loaves or one ginormous loaf).
• Cover the pan(s) with a damp towel and let the dough rise for another hour in a warm place.
• Once the dough has doubled in size, bake it at 350 degrees for about 50 minutes.

Ways to enjoy this awesome bread:

• Fresh out of the oven
• As a side at dinner
• For French toast
• With peanut butter, butter, jam or Nutella
• When you want a snack but can’t figure out what. The honey inside makes it taste good plain.

Recently I’ve been on a quest to learn how to cook from scratch. I have been blundering through this assignment in an orderly manner for the past several months. You’d never think there could be such well-planned disasters. But to my dismay, planned menus don’t always lead to a good meal. Things like whole wheat pasta and homemade tortillas and even peanut butter cookies are vicious creatures waiting to attack if you are caught off guard.

Since I am a pragmatist, I used to rely heavily on recipes that called for condensed cream soups—you know, cream of mushroom, cream of chicken and cream of celery. I gave these up for the assignment because of some suspicious ingredients: MSG, tons of sodium, preservatives with long names. Not to mention, I discovered that canned foods in general are suspicious because can lining is made of BPA (toxic chemical). Oh yes. AND—have you ever noticed that the soup sort of maintains the shape of the can when you pour it out? That just seemed wrong and gross.

But I started missing the taste (and convenience) of those condensed soup based recipes. I did some research and found the perfect, pragmatic solution: homemade condensed cream soup substitutes. What’s great about them is that you can prepare them in less than ten minutes!

Here’s what you need. This is the substitute for one can of condensed cream of chicken:

2 T butter
3 T flour
1/2 c chicken broth
1/2 c milk
Salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Stir in the flour. Slowly stir in the milk and chicken broth and heat the mixture until it bubbles. Keep stirring the whole time. When it bubbles, reduce heat and continue stirring until it thickens.  When it’s thick, add salt and pepper to taste (a few shakes is good).

Voila. More natural cream of chicken soup, ready to go into your recipe.

I am thrilled about this discovery—not only is it a pragmatic substitute for condensed cream soups, but it is tastier, healthier and easy to alter. Here are a few more tips:

• For low-fat versions, use 1 T butter and nonfat milk.
• For a condensed cream of celery soup substitute, saute about 1/4 c of finely chopped celery in the butter until tender before you add flour. Don’t use chicken broth (unless you want to have chicken flavor) – use a full cup of milk instead.
• For a condensed cream of mushroom soup substitute, saute about 1/4 c of finely chopped mushrooms in the butter for 2-3 minutes before you add the flour. Use a full cup of milk instead of half milk, half broth.
• To adjust consistency, increase or decrease the amount of flour you use.