The Urbane Homestead

What a great day!

Not only do we see the beginning of a new era of civil (in all senses of the word) government, but our new espresso machine arrived this morning. Even as we speak I'm waiting for the water tank to heat up. I look forward to a future in which I am well-governed and fully caffeinated!

Taking stock

 

Now that fall is here it's time to make stock again. (Maybe I should have started out with, while the market is down, it's time to make stock?) (But since I started out by talking seasonally, I should add that yes, I know it's been fall for some time now--but there's some lag time between my personal universe and the big public one.)

Here's my stock-keeping system: I put my giant stock pot, empty, in the chest freezer in the basement. As meals get cooked and eaten upstairs, bits of onion peel, asparagus ends, chicken bones, parsley stems, carrot peels, wrinkly cherry tomatoes, and other miscellany are set aside, and dumped in the stock pot to freeze. When the pot is full to the brim with jetsam, I bring it upstairs, fill it with water in the sink, and heave it onto the stove (remembering, of course, to lift with my legs). I add nothing else. For a few hours, it simmers merrily. The next day, after a suitable cooling-off period, I put the pot back in the sink (for easier reach and less clean-up), and the detritus is removed. The stock is ladled into plastic quart take-out containers to be frozen and used later in soups and such.

I don't add anything extra to the stock, and I don't keep track of what's in there. Most bits of vegetable and meat are fine, and some fruits, such as apples, which are not too sweet. I usually don't add fish bits. Each batch of stock is slightly different, but somehow it always tastes good. I did have to dump a batch once because I had put several lemon rinds in, and somehow boiling them gave it a weird and unpleasant taste, but that's the only flavor failure I've had. usually it even makes good soup on its own, with a little salt and a squeeze of lemon, and two or three nice big matzo balls.

Making stock is a fall/winter/spring thing because it fills the house with the warm, steamy, savory smell of soup - unbearable in the summer, but so delicious in the cooler weather.

Dinner tonight

Dinner was a seasonal stew that turned out very nicely, despite Joe's wails of complaint when he walked in the door after school and realized from the aromas wafting from the kitchen that he was to be deprived of pizza again. So very cruel.

Anyway: Autumn Stew

Brown in stew pot, with oil as appropriate: 2 lb. stewing beef
Add and cook until golden and soft: 1 med/lg onion
Stir in: 1-2 T sweet paprika, 1-2 t cocoa, 1 t sugar, salt, thyme, rosemary
Add: 1 lg can whole peeled tomatoes, 1 c. coffee
Stir in gently: 1 med butternut squash, peeled and cubed in largish chunks
Add stock to cover. Simmer gently until done.

Serve with hearty bread.

Yum.

Good, and good for you

There seems to be a lot of talk about yogurt in the blogosphere lately (e.g. here and here). Why now, I wonder? Perhaps because as spring turns the corner into summer, we look for the refreshing, the cool, the light. Perhaps also our inner forebears come out from the back brain where there is no refrigeration and seek to prevent the spoilable from, well, spoiling. And perhaps it's fashion. Just as brown is again the new black, yogurt is the new mocha latte.

Anyway, for what it's worth, here's my recipe for yogurt:

Heat one quart milk, stirring constantly, to 180º. Then let it cool, stirring constantly, to 120º. Whisk in, thoroughly, two tablespoons of active culture yogurt (i.e. plain old yogurt). Pour into a jar, old yogurt container, or insulated jug. Place on heating pad set on "low," wrap in a towel, and leave overnight. Refrigerate. Eat.

And here's a recipe for ayran, a refreshing and wildly popular yogurt drink from Turkey: In a quart jar or shaker, put a cup of yogurt, a half cup to a cup of water, ice cubes, and a generous pinch of salt. Shake until smooth and foamy. Drink. Ayran is so popular in Turkey that they even serve it at the Istanbul McDonald's. Don't ask me how I know.

Maple syrup season

Spring is really on the way: it's maple syrup season! At my Quaker boarding school, it was the job of the sophomore class each year to make apple cider in the fall, and maple syrup in the spring. When I was a sophomore in, um, 1977, we collected the sap in a stand of trees several miles from the school, then trucked it back and and boiled it in a big vat out on the green of the campus. I remember standing around the vat on a grey afternoon, wearing wool plaid lumberjack shirts and boots, and warming our hands in the sweet-smelling vapor that billowed up in the cold spring air. It's a delightful memory and (for some reason) I love thinking of myself as a person with real-life maple-syrup-making experience. But it's not like making strawberry jam; it's a big project and not one you can knock off in a free afternoon, so it's another one of these things I keep in my mental hope chest of projects to return to someday. In the meantime, here's how, just in case you have time to make syrup. Let me know if you do, and we'll be right over; Henry makes fabulous pancakes.

Lunch

I returned from Florida with a rotten, rotten cold. So did Joe, but as usual his ran its course and vanished within a few hours, whereas mine lingers. All weekend I languished on the sofa, coughing consumptively and murmuring like a Tennessee Williams character, "I'll be bettah, come Spring...." And  lo, today the sun is shining, and here I am, back at work, sniffling only slightly but ready for action. (Although, when I say "action," what I really mean is "spending many hours deleting spam and reading email before getting any actual work done.")

And now it's time for lunch. I did manage to make one meal over the weekend: I threw a chuck roast in the big wide crockpot with some sundried tomatoes and their oil, a couple handfuls of those baby-sized sweet red and yellow peppers, paprika, ground allspice, and salt. Oh, and a half dozen cloves of garlic, cut in large pieces. It tasted great on Sunday with crusty bread, and even better yesterday with noodles. Now, here it is again in my lunchbag, looking very substantial.

I'm not sure, in my weakened state, if I'm up for that level of commitment. I might go out for some nice hot soup.

Pizza, again

Dinnertime approached. On weekends, we often eat better than we do during the rest of the week, because weekends are when I do all the cooking for the rest of the week, so that's when it's fresh. Sadly, cooking doesn't get a chance to happen every weekend, and that's when the whole system fails. This weekend, though, I managed to make a pot of Roman beans; I rinsed the beans and soaked them overnight in water, then rinsed again and replaced the water with stock, threw in a peeled, halved onion and a handful of peppercorns, and simmered until soft. Then I added salt (having learned the hard—ha ha—way that salt and sugar can't be added before the beans are fully cooked). The beans would make a delicious dinner served with rice or corn tortillas and sliced avocados and tomatoes. Yum! Even Joe will eat beans, since, of course, the more you eat, the more beautiful music you can make. For some reason, though, when it was almost time for dinner, we panicked and forgot about the beans, and ended up having pizza yet again. It's a scary thing when the pizza shop owner recognizes your voice when you call to put in your order.