Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [45]
3. Pour the broth back into the pot and add the chicken and rice. Simmer, adding more water if necessary, until the rice is very tender, about 25 minutes.
4. In a small bowl, beat the eggs and lemon juice until frothy. Add a few ladlefuls of the hot soup, whisking energetically. Pour the mixture into the pot and stir well. Taste for salt and lemon juice and adjust if necessary. Add pepper to taste, and serve immediately.
Serves 6, with leftovers
CHICKEN STOCK
I dread making stock, but dislike wasting food even more, so whenever I have a chicken carcass, I pull out the soup kettle. I put the carcass and any juices from the roasting pan inside, add water to cover, a bay leaf, a sliced onion, and, if I have them, a couple of peeled carrots, a stalk of celery, and a handful of parsley. If I don’t have carrots, celery, or parsley, I don’t put them in. I bring the mixture to a boil, then turn it down and let it simmer, barely bubbling, for a few hours. I strain it into a big bowl, cool it to room temperature, refrigerate it overnight, lift off the cap of grainy yellow fat, ladle the stock into storage containers, and put them in the freezer. I usually end up with about 2 quarts.
It sounds so frugal and practical and simple—what’s not to love? What I dread about making stock is manifold. To start with, I never know what to do with the damp chicken bones and slimy cooked vegetables. I can’t put them in the compost and I don’t feed chicken to the chickens. If it’s not close to garbage day, the bones start to smell in the kitchen trash can—but if I put them in the outdoor can, the raccoons go berserk trying to pry off the lid and sometimes succeed, in which case, what a mess in the morning. Mark likes to stow the bones in a bag in the freezer but then he never remembers to put it out on trash day so we end up with unlabeled bags of bones. And since we have but one small freezer, that means there’s nowhere to store the chicken stock.
Vessels for storing the stock present another challenge. Tupperware and yogurt containers work nicely, but they always seem to be either too small or too big or too few. I’ve tried freezing in canning jars, but sometimes they crack. You can freeze stock in resealable gallon bags and that works great until it doesn’t. Once I neatly filled a bag with stock, sealed it, put it in a big bowl for support, and propped it up in the freezer. Sometime in the night, the seal broke, the bag slithered out of the bowl and stock spilled everywhere, freezing in a solid yellow puddle. It’s still there. But how can I ever defrost and clean my freezer when it’s so full of bones and stock?
On the plus side, it’s cheaper to make stock than to buy it, especially if you start with a carcass you would otherwise discard. I estimate that homemade stock, including fuel, costs about $0.25 per cup to make while store-bought canned stock costs about $0.75 a cup. Moreover, if you read the labels of the leading brands, your skin will crawl. It’s insulting what Swanson and Campbell put in their soup: among the offenders are corn oil, MSG, and sugar. In fact, the thought of what’s in those cans disgusts me so much I can’t buy them anymore. I don’t enjoy making stock, but I do it.
BAYLEAF
If bay leaf didn’t exist, would anyone miss it? I’ve never tasted something and thought, This stew is just crying out for bay leaf. But I keep buying and using it nonetheless. This is another case where it really pays to get out of the big-box supermarket. You can buy a 0.12-ounce jar of McCormick bay leaves at Safeway for $5.19. An equivalent amount from my favorite Chinese market: $0.19.
CHAPTER 7
JUNK FOOD AND CANDY
“Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself,” Michael Pollan writes in Food Rules. “If you made all the french fries you ate, you would eat them much less often, if only because they’re