Cookin' Up the Harvest a.k.a. Wednesday Food Porn

I'm not what you'd call a "foodie," even though I love food and both the eating and cooking thereof. I'm not into fancy or exotic, though I do enjoy them on occasion.  What I am into is the fine art of being a household chef: You see, to me, the true measure of a good cook is the ability to work with the foods available to create healthy meals the whole family will actually eat and, hopefully, do so with gusto.I pride myself in my ability to keep the family in nutritious home-made soup stock made purely from vegetable and meat scraps we would have otherwise thrown away or my ability to whip up meals of whatever vegetables just happen to need to be eaten ASAP.  These meals may not look pretty...they may not have the delicate balance of flavor and texture you'd find in a fancy restaurant...and, yes, they may be the same four or five veggies made several different ways with little variety in the dishes other than the spices...but they'll feed the whole family for the next several days and, by golly, our taste buds will love us when we're done!

Today was one of those days where I looked in the fridge and realized most of our fresh vegetables were about to go bad, we had a plethora of stock-making odds and ends filling our freezer, and we had just enough space in the fridge to fit a few Tupperware containers of meals...  Those were my cue: it was time to have a bit of creative fun in the kitchen today!

The Joys of Bread-Based Puddings

We never eat the ends of our breads.  Not only that, but we rarely ever manage to finish off all of our baked goods (biscuits, pancakes, etc.) before they go stale.  They say its bad luck to throw bread away - the idea being that throwing away bread means throwing away prosperity - so I've been avoiding throwing bread in the trash for years.  We used to freeze it all and take it to the park to feed the ducks and geese, but, as much as I love those birds and enjoy feeding them, I wanted another option. So, I've been testing out some ways to reuse these bread products to make our food dollar stretch as much as possible.

As it turns out, there are a ton of great pudding recipes out there that let you turn your stale bread products into crowd-pleasing desserts.  My personal favorite is the classic Amish Bread Pudding, which always turns out sweet and spongy.  Once I even made it with a combination of wheat bread and coffee cake and ended up with a fluffy, cinnamon treat that was perfect for breakfast. 

Occasionally a fancy bread pudding recipe will make its way into a modern cookbook, but for the most part, this ancient style of pudding seem to have been sadly forgotten in the new American Foodie world.  Luckily, I have my favorite old stand-by for forgotten kitchen wisdom: The American Woman's Cookbook.  In it, I have found several creative versions of bread pudding, including coconut-bread pudding and bread pudding with jam.  It's amazing to me what delectable treats can be made from the scraps in our fridge and pantry!

Finally, but not the least in my recently acquired repertoire of bready desserts, I have finally discovered the joys of a dish I've heard about my whole life but never gotten to taste: a Brown Betty.  As it turns out, this dish is a super-simple fruit pudding made with bread crumbs (it's typically made with apples, but any in-season fruit can be used).  And no, this is not the apple crisp so often referred to as a Brown Betty (in fact, when I Googled images of the dish, all I came up with were pictures of crisps), but a thick, gelatinous goo that tastes wonderful and could be parsed over oatmeal or pancakes as easily as it could be eaten by itself with some cream or ice cream. 

With all these things to do with my extra bread, I do hope the birds don't go hungry!

  

Save it All and Make Stock!

I love fresh vegetables! Unless you have your own garden, though, fresh isn't always cheap nowadays.  Personally, I like to visit our local Korean grocery store and plan meals around the veggies they have on sale.  Even still, though, I would prepare my vegetables in the modern manner of chopping off the ends and peeling straight into the trash can.  One night, I was preparing a particularly veggie-heavy meal and was shocked to see how much food I had wasted by throwing these scraps in the trash.  I thought about composting, but I don't have a garden so compost was not going to result in more food on my table.  Since it was winter and I was on a soup-making kick, I then thought, "Hey, why not save all these vitamins and minerals and put them in some soup?"

And so began the filling of my freezer with funny things:

• Every time I cut veggies now, I save everything (the stalks of fresh herbs, the ends of tomatoes, celery leaves, carrot and potato peels, mushroom stems, etc.) except the truly rotten parts and throw them in a bag in the freezer.
• Any time I open a canned or jarred vegetable - and I'm not just talking green beans here...I do this with everything from beans to olives and artichoke hearts - I don't drain it over the sink.  Naw, that'd just be a waste of nutrition! So I drain them into a lidded container (I use the same one and just add to it until it's full) that I throw into the freezer for later.
• Bone-in meats are typically cheaper than meat without the bone, so we often will purchase these and cut the meat off the bone ourselves.  This not only saves us money at the store but adds to my stock for stock! Every time we have meat with bones, I save the bones in a lidded container or seal-able bag that gets thrown into the freezer as soon as the meal is done.

I was surprised at how quickly my freezer filled up with vegetable ends, funny looking frozen liquids, and the bones of various meats.  Once I had enough, I was ready to make my first batch of stock!

The process of making stock is ridiculously easy:

1. Throw all of the frozen veggie ends into a large pot.  If I have them, I also like to add a cut up onion or two and some smashed garlic for extra flavor.
2. Break the smaller frozen bones in half and throw all the bones (and, presumably, the meat pieces stuck to them) into the pot.  Note: To get the most out of the bones, you can saw the thicker bones in half as well.  Breaking the bones helps expose the marrow to the water, allowing more flavor and nutrition to soak into your broth.  
3. Warm up your container of frozen liquids by running it under hot water - do this just enough to unfreeze the liquids from the sides (otherwise, you won't be able to get it out of the container) - and empty it into the pot.
4. Add at least enough tap water to completely cover all the veggies and bones.  As long as you have enough water to cover your ingredients, you can add as much water as you want at this stage.  Just be aware that the more water you add, the weaker your broth will be (storage-saving tip: you can always make a more concentrated stock and dilute it when you reheat it).
5. Bring it all to a boil then immediately reduce the heat, cover, and let it simmer for HOURS!  Personally, I like to start the stock in the morning and let it simmer all day long.  Towards the early evening, to save on fuel, I'll turn off the stove, but leave the soup cooking in its own heat for at least an hour or so.  Note: If you don't have time to cook it this way, you can just throw it all into a crock pot and set it on low so that it cooks while you're at work for the day.
6. Once the stock has been cooked, strain out all of the solids - now there is nothing left to do with these but compost.  At this stage, I'll also try to sift through the mush and pull out all of the bits of meat that fell off the bones while cooking.  This meat I'll save for adding to soups.
7. Once you have your stock, you're ready to use it to make soups, stews, gravies, flavored rice, and so many other things!  But how do you store this huge pot of stock you just made so it won't go bad before you have a chance to use it all up?

Aromatic, Rich, and Oh So Yummy!

• Pour some into ice cube trays and freeze it.  This will give you small amounts of stock that can be used to make gravy or add flavor to rice or vegetables.
• Pour most into several medium-size lidded containers to be frozen for soups and stews.
• Keep only as much as you plan to use within the next week in a lidded container in your fridge.

My first batch of stock, a combination of potato and carrot peels, mushroom bits, leek leaves, cilantro and parsley stalks, tomato ends, bits and pieces of several types of squash, fish and chicken bones, bacon drippings, and the liquids from canned olives, artichoke hearts, and canned chicken, turned out wonderfully!  The house filled with the aroma of the herbs as the broth cooked over the day and I learned that you have to wait until the strained solids cool before you start sifting for meat!  All in all it was a fun and easy process that created a broth my whole family raved about with plenty left over in the freezer for my next soup!