I got a slightly anguished text from DH earlier:
"Nuts! It's wet out here!"
It has been howling a gale today but, as ever, the mail must be delivered and DH delivers it come rain or shine. My offer of setting up a 'soup station' upon his return was met by an enthusiastic reply:
"SOUP! SOUP! SOUP!"
Two hours later a very wet and bedraggled DH shuffled into the kitchen just as I put the finishing touches to a big pot of leek and potato soup. It's his favourite and luckily easy to make, but it wouldn't be as good without a decent base of stock. Soup is the main reason I always boil down meat bones to extract all of the goodness - gelatin, amino acids and minerals.
Stocks are surprisingly comforting when you are ill as well. When I first started trying to work out what foods I was intolerant to, mugs of stock and broth were my breakfast for quite a while. Basic broth was recommended as one of the few foods that people don't react to and would help the gut healing process. I would buy a bag of beef bones from the the butchers, which were the most enormous things you've ever seen in your life. Until I got close up to a beef rib bone I didn't really appreciate the actual size of a grown cow.
There's only one problem with the stuff: it stinks while it's cooking. I cook my bones down for 24-48 hours in the slow cooker and the stench when I wake up in the morning is almost nauseating. The pig trotter ones above have proved particularly pungent. At some point I want to have a spot in the barns to make stock that's protected from the mice but for now the kitchen with the door closed has to do.
My stock is usually based on onions, bay leaves or rosemary twigs, peppercorns, sometimes carrots or broccoli stalks (although lately I've been saving these for the soup itself) and a couple of large splashes of vinegar to encourage the minerals to leach out of the bones. I then add a couple of kettle-fulls of boiling water and put the slow cooker on low, usually 24 hours for small bones like chicken and 48 hours for big ones like beef rib bones.
The result is often thick and gelatinous which, when strained, decanted and cooled, is solid with a layer of fat on the top. I leave the fat to act as a kind of barrier to the air in the same way you top jam with paraffin.
I make at least one stock a week, which is usually enough for one huge pot of soup that does the three of us for lunch for a couple of days. Not always leek and potato, I like to skulk around the reduced veg section for interesting yellow sticker bargains. Last week it was two packs of whole chestnut mushrooms (for a whole 25p each!) that I added garlic and thyme to, before that three packs of prepared butternut squash for 20p each, which I roasted and cooked down with chilli.
Absolutely lush!
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