Taking Stock

I do a lot of cooking, particularly in the wintertime when having the stove or oven going helps to keep me warm. It also gives me something else to do when I can’t enjoy being outdoors and get bored with reading. In warm weather I grill outside. I have quite a few cookbooks and I turn to favorite recipes often to make bread, stews, soups, cakes, pies, etc.  I would rather make it myself from scratch than buy it ready-made at the supermarket. It is time consuming to cook from scratch, but then time is what you have a lot of after you retire. When you cook something yourself, you put in only the best ingredients, things you’ve grown in your own garden or purchased at a farmer’s market from local growers, or organic things from Whole Foods, etc. No preservatives, no additives, not too much salt or sugar, etc

I knew nothing about cooking when I was first married. My mother had taught me very little about cooking because she was not the world’s best cook. Although, she did teach me how to make blintzes (and hence crepes) - a skill I have employed many, times over the years. My mother cooked from the same recipes her whole life. In my mother’s day, just a couple of cookbooks sufficed: a Fanny Farmer Cookbook, a local cookbook produced by some church women, and later, a Betty Crocker cookbook. 

If you came from a definite ethnic background – Italian, German, Hungarian, etc., you probably grew up eating meals made from recipes that were handed down over generations. I had the unfortunate culinary background of essentially non-cooking women of English, Irish, Swedish and Rumanian ancestry. In my childhood home we ate foods of startling American simplicity: unadorned pan-fried pork chops, done to chewy, blackened splendor which, to give them their due, did help to develop our jaw muscles. I remember that canned Vienna sausages figured in there for some menus, and something called a cottage ham which I remember as being a vivid red color, laced with copious amounts of fat, and tremendous amounts of salt. Leftover cottage ham was sliced into chunks and cooked in a pan with lots of brown sugar. Our jaws might be healthy, but our teeth were another matter. Our vegetables came out of cans, salty, flaccid little chunks of matter, usually an olive drab color. Was this style of cooking a holdover from WWII? The Civil War? 

But all that was before Julia Child came into the lives of ordinary Americans and our fascination with cooking was born, or at least my fascination with cooking was born. To be honest, I’d had an earlier brush with good cooking during the 1960’s, living in California – a place where vegetables were actually grown and consumed in a fresh condition, and practically everyone had a subscription to Sunset magazine where we read about new and exciting ways of preparing food.  After my friends and I began to have children we threw ourselves into the healthy food movement by making our own yogurt, baking our own multi-grain breads, creating our own granola. shopping at the Co-Op  (a precursor of  Bread and Circus, Whole Foods, Wild Oats).  We made everything from scratch.  Since I was living in California, I wanted to learn to cook Mexican food and Japanese food because I kept eating out at restaurants where I was enjoying fantastic dishes that I wanted to learn how to make myself.   I was already deep into cooking Italian food and Chinese food.  And where would I be without Molly Goldberg’s Jewish Cookbook and Jenny Grossinger’s The Art of Jewish Cooking?  Both paperbacks are now so old that they are simply collections of loose pages, all brittle and brown around the edges, held together by rubber bands. The Molly Goldberg cookbook has a price of 50 cents still on it, and the Grossinger went for 60 cents. Boy, those were the days.  I cooked out of those books for years and years.

Over time, my cookbook collection has waxed and waned. I have received some cookbooks as gifts, and have purchased many myself. Some are general cookbooks covering lots of territory: the Joy of Cooking, the Fanny Farmer Cookbook, the New York Times Cookbook, Jane Brody’s Good Food Book;  some pertain to the cooking of certain countries: Mexico, France, Japan, China, Italy. Some are vegetarian. Some are for specific things: soups, breads, pies, cakes, breakfasts, brunches, picnics, seafood.  Some are for regional cooking: New England, southern states, New York, Chicago, New Orleans. I have gotten rid of some cookbooks over the years. There were inevitably some that I found I was not using at all anymore, and they were just taking up valuable shelf space. Those got the heave-ho, or actually were recycled through a swap shop.

You wouldn’t think I would need any more cookbooks, or that I would care about learning how to cook differently or need to add new dishes to my repertoire.  And yet, I still find myself reading reviews of cookbooks and skimming though them in bookstores. I am addicted to watching the cooking shows on WGBH and the food network. I turn to many different recipe websites on the Internet on the spur of the moment when I crave something new and different – what can I do with squid that I haven’t done before?  If I don’t grill this Portobello, can I cook it in a fry pan or broil it? How long? Marinade? I’ve got 4 leftover egg yolks, what can I make that calls for 4 egg yolks? The Internet is a real help.

All of this brings me to a cookbook that I read recently: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman (Wiley, 2007). Mark Bittman wrote for the New York Times and has written a few other cookbooks, especially one called How to Cook Everything.  I took the Vegetarian Bittman book out of the library after reading a very positive review of it (probably in the New York Times!).  It is a HUGE book and it covers all aspects of food preparation. It is so much more than just another vegetarian cookbook. In fact, I soon realized that I wanted to buy this cookbook, that I would use it often. The first thing that I made out of this book was Roasted Vegetable Stock. Now when I need to use stock, I usually use chicken stock.  Occasionally I will use a beef stock, but I never use vegetable stock because I have never found one I like. But when I looked at this recipe, and read what Bittman had to say about why he felt all these particular ingredients needed to be used, and why all these steps would result in a fabulous stock, I felt I needed to try it out. 

Off to Whole Foods to buy organic vegetables. A dish is only as good as what goes into it. I bought everything the recipe called for, no skimping, and no substitutions.

If you are going to spend the afternoon in the kitchen cooking, best to turn out several things and not just one, so I decided to deal with the four leftover egg yolks also. I made two loaves of egg bread (used 2 egg yolks there) and made a bittersweet chocolate pudding (2 egg yolks there) that I will use to make a pie tomorrow.

Bittman suggests you roast the vegetables before using them in water to make the stock. So I did that. I even de-glazed the roasting pan as he instructed. I followed his recipe exactly, and you know what? I ended up with a vegetable stock that is SUPERB. It is rich and intensely flavorful. It will make a fantastic base for other dishes although one could certainly just sip this heavenly broth all by itself. It stands up to chicken or beef stock and will now be my go-to stock of choice. Except, of course, when I need a seafood stock. And there are times when only a chicken stock will do. Anyway, I will always have some in the freezer. This is an example of why I keep reading new cookbooks, and trying new things. I just never know where the next wonderful surprise is going to come from. How much poorer my life would be if I had not found this recipe. MMMMM, beautiful soup.