The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (41 page)

I'd roasted all the bones and made most of them into stock. I kept a small pan of each set of bones to show off the result of roasting. The chicken bones had a crisp quality and a mahogany color in some places where the bone was exposed, and wept brown puddles of caramelized goodness onto the pan. The beef bones looked dried and nearly charred, like trees in a forest recently ravaged by fire.

I had Ted take over the explanation. For chicken, beef, veal, or other meat-based stock, the method remains the same. “You can just simmer chicken in water with the vegetables. That's known as white stock,” Ted said. “But you'll get more flavor if you roast the bones first. You want your oven nice and hot, around 400 degrees. The goal is to caramelize the bones a bit. About a half hour or forty-five minutes is usually enough. When you can really start to smell them, that's when you're getting somewhere.”

I waved everyone over to the big stove. “Okay, here are the two pots of stock that I made from the rest of the bones. They've been simmering about two hours. I want you to smell it and taste it.”

Lisa handed everyone a spoon. Each person dutifully sniffed the gurgling liquids, then dipped her spoon in and sipped a taste. They looked thoughtfully at one another. “It reminds me of the stock tasting,” Cheryl said. “It's more meaty and chickeny.”

“So you take the browned bones, put them in a pot, and cover them with cold water. It's great to add some water to the roasting pans while they're hot and scrape up any browned bits left in them,” Ted said. “It will clean your pans and boost the flavor of your stock. Add vegetables, typically onion, carrot, and celery. The usual ratio is one pound of vegetables for every three pounds of bones. Add a bay leaf, some thyme, parsley. Some people like to add whole peppercorns and some garlic.”

The point is to simmer them for as long as it takes for “the bones to give their all,” as Julia Child once wrote. For chicken, that's usually two to four hours; for beef, about double that.

Ted pulled a ladle from among the coterie of utensils and demonstrated a key technique. First he skimmed off a slight oil slick on the top of the stock, and then tackled an island of bubbling foam. “Skimming simply means to do a seek-and-destroy of any foam or fat on the surface,” Ted said. “It makes a world of difference to both stock and soup. It keeps it from being greasy, for one thing.”

Ted had a few other points on meat-based stocks. “Try not to boil it or it will turn cloudy. What you want to do is get it superhot and then reduce the heat until you get the occasional, or ‘lazy,' bubble. Don't add salt. As the water evaporates, the salt flavor will concentrate and it can be too salty.”

Since Lisa had brought in her soup book for show-and-tell, I opened a copy of
Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
by Deborah Madison. During my fling with vegetarianism, I started to make vegetable stocks, a habit that I keep up. “They're built the same way. Roast the vegetables and then simmer for about a half hour. This book has a great section on vegetable stocks.” I flipped through the section. “There's a whole breakdown of vegetables to use by season, stocks for stirfries and curries, mushroom stock, and even tomato-style stock. You just want to avoid strong flavors such as cabbage, beets, broccoli, or, as she puts it, ‘funky or spoiled' vegetables that you wouldn't eat.”

Next, we moved on to fish stock. In French, it's known as “fish fumet,” a common foundation in chowders and seafood dishes. I had bought two pounds of fish bones for a dollar from my regular fishmonger, an assortment of fragile skeletons and thick pieces of white bones from larger fish.

“A lot of recipes will call for clam juice, but what the food writer really wants you to use is fish stock.” Personally, I loathe clam juice. Most supermarket varieties are simply too brackish. “Even the cheap stuff is almost three bucks for eight ounces, so you're paying twelve dollars for a quart. You want white fish without too strong a flavor. No mackerel, no salmon.” I combined some onion, celery, half a lemon, a bay leaf, a few sprigs of parsley, and the fish bones in a pot with cold water.

“You can do the same thing with shrimp, crab, or lobster shells, too. I sometimes get Dungeness crab shells from my fish market. They're free and it's awesome in gumbo,” I said.

Together, Ted and I strained the pot of gurgling chicken stock. “If you've got a big pot, don't try to pour it out. Remove the bones with tongs, and then ladle the liquid out.” He ladled the stock through a mesh sieve lined with cheesecloth over a massive bowl. “This is traditional but a colander with a coffee filter works, too.” After the chicken, he strained the fish fumet.

“I'm totally not digging that smell,” Dri said of the fumet. “I mean, I guess it's good for chowder, but it's pretty fishy.” Sabra nodded. She wasn't into it either.

A hot steaming pot of stock cools slowly and has a tendency to linger in what food safety types refer to as the “danger zone,” or temperatures between 40 and 140 degrees. “You want to make sure your stock stays out of the danger zone by cooling it quickly,” Ted said. “You can do a few things. Take the stock and put it into an ice bath in the sink and keep stirring. You can pour it into a shallow pan, like the bottom of broiler. Or you can wait until the stock cools below 180 degrees and then plop plastic bags filled with ice into the stock. Whatever, once it cools to room temperature or below, put it into the fridge right away.”

The other option is the remarkably low-tech “cold porch” method, Lisa added. “In winter, I just put a big pan of stock outside uncovered and stir it every so often until it cools down.”

Shannon signaled a time-out. “Okay, I'm a little confused. What's the difference between stock and broth?”

“Stock is made from bones, broth is not. Technically, there's no such thing as vegetable stock. But since people aren't sure, a lot of things are called stock interchangeably with broth.”

“All these years, and I never knew that,” Shannon said.

We went back to the soups. Team Chicken finished theirs by tossing in handfuls of pasta left over from the pasta class, shredded cooked chicken, and chopped fresh parsley and oregano. Team Minestrone added chopped tomatoes, a can of red beans, then garnished each bowl with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and chopped basil.

The streetlights came on outside. Each person slurped the various soups. Lisa produced a bottle of cava from the fridge. With great drama, she launched the cork and we all toasted.

“Here's a toast to you,” Dri said to Lisa, Ted, and me. We clinked glasses.

“Here's to all of you and your willingness to chop zucchini!” I said. Clink.

“To zucchini!” Sabra said. Clink.

“To diapers!” Shannon said. Clink.

Then the mood turned bittersweet as the volunteers reluctantly took off their aprons and dropped their diapers into the bag we hauled around for the dirty laundry.

After they left, Lisa, Ted, and I did a final cleanup in the kitchen. I stayed behind to mop. Alone in the kitchen, I dragged the bright yellow roller and swished the mottled gray-yarn mop across the black-and-white tile. I was deep into the Zen of the rhythmic motion when my phone rang.

“It's Eddie,” my mother said.

My stepfather, Eddie, had suffered from an impressive string of maladies in the past dozen years. A recent surgery had left him weak, and since then he'd been falling. That morning, he collapsed and broke a chair. My mother tried for forty-five minutes to get him up. An ER doctor diagnosed him with pneumonia, a serious illness for a seventy-eight-year-old who already had enough health problems.

This time I heard something different in my mother's voice: sheer exhaustion. He'd barely slept for a week. I knew that as his caretaker, she hadn't either. “Mom, I'm coming home,” I told her. She insisted that it wasn't necessary. I hung up and called Mike, then I finished mopping the floor. By the time I got home, Mike had booked me a ticket to leave the next afternoon.

We had set up a couple of makeup classes for the following week. I called Lisa. “Oh, no, should we reschedule?” she said.

“No, you're going to teach them,” I said.

“I can't teach them by myself,” she replied quickly. “Let's reschedule.”

“Are you kidding?
I've
learned stuff from you. So of course you can. I have total faith in you.”

In Florida, the relief on Mom's face said it all. She looked as if she'd aged years. Eddie's gaunt appearance threw me. A thin guy by nature, he'd lost twenty-five pounds. His cheeks had an unhealthy hollow. As I hugged him, I asked, “What can I do for you, Eddie?”

“Make me dinner?” he asked. “It's not like I travel now. The highlight of my day is hitting Walgreens for prescriptions. Food is all that I have to look forward to.”

That week, my sister, Sandy, and I spent two full days making huge vats of food, from spaghetti with meatballs to beef stew to scalloped potatoes. Fresh from the soup class, I cleared out my mother's fridge to make three different varieties, including chicken noodle, Eddie's favorite. Ever competitive, Sandy made Eddie's all-time favorite meal, a classic full-on Thanksgiving spread replete with turkey, mashed potatoes with gravy, and homemade stuffing. We diligently labeled and froze all of it into portions sized for two—enough for two months' worth of meals.

Doing this gave my exhausted mom a break from both shopping and cooking. She rested, and we took long walks on the beach together. The stockpile of varied foods kept Eddie interested in eating. Each morning, she'd open the freezer and ask what he wanted. “How about we have the turkey gumbo for lunch and the cassoulet for dinner?” He gained back some weight and his condition improved. Before leaving for the airport, he gave me a lingering hug as he thanked me for the meals. “I can tell with every bite that you love us.”

As I sat on the plane back to Seattle, I thought about the power of cooking to nourish, to comfort, and to heal. It was the fourth time in one year that I had contributed meals to people's freezers in the midst of a crisis: Mike's sister had gone through chemotherapy for breast cancer, a friend's husband had had surgery to remove a brain tumor, and our friend Amy had suffered life-threatening complications after the birth of her son.

It's a simple act, but to bring someone chicken soup when they're sick is not just about a meal, it's a tangible and physical sign of caring. If you buy a chicken and make it from scratch, the message is completely different from bringing over a can. It says, “You're important, and I care about you enough to take the time to help restore you.” Like laughter, soup is not the same when it's canned.

 

Bones from 1 roast chicken
medium onion, quartered
1 celery stalk, roughly chopped
1 large carrot, chopped
Few sprigs of fresh thyme and/or parsley
1 garlic clove
1 bay leaf
4 to 5 quarts cold water

 

Put the chicken bones, onion, celery, carrot, fresh herbs, garlic clove, and bay leaf into a 5-quart or larger pot. Add 4 to 5 quarts of cold water. Bring just to a boil and then turn the heat down until it simmers. Let it simmer for at least 1 hour and up to 3 hours. Skim any foam or fat from the top with a spoon. Drain it in a colander or mesh sieve lined with cheesecloth or a coffee filter into a large bowl. Cool, then refrigerate or freeze until needed.