Charmed Life
Last week I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a good, long while: I made homemade chicken stock. I had roasted a delicious chicken on Sunday and threw that carcass into a stock pot. And I had two other Ziploc bags full of bones from chickens I’d roasted this summer. With all those bones, I anticipated an amazingly flavorful stock that would have me declaring “Hell, no!” to any store-bought stocks.
Not so much.
For one, making chicken stock is a lot of work, especially if, like me, you are silly enough to throw ALL the bones in the pot. Doing so ensures you will spend precious hours (or at least 20 minutes) of your life running your hands through the strained stock to make sure tiny little bones didn’t slip through the strainer holes. (They did.) I was making this stock as part of making a chicken soup for my neighbors, one of whom is a 90-year-old fellow. I had visions of him choking on the soup and me crying out, as the ambulance came, “I’m sorry. The road to hell is paved with good intentions!”
Then there was the time factor. I simmered the stock for hours. Six hours. I skimmed the fat, added more water as it boiled off, and generally had to worry over it for longer than I wanted to.
And then, after all that bone-picking and all that time, the stock tasted….wan. Bland. Unremarkable. Certainly not worth the effort.
Luckily I had a few corn cobs in yet another Ziploc in the freezer. I tossed those in and within minutes they’d delivered a sweet, corn taste to my broth. They saved the soup. (And, no, my neighbor didn’t die from it.)
When I told my tale of woe to my colleague here, he suggested I buy some broth from Soup’s On Baltimore, which is right down the street from the Style offices. They sell it for $2/quart. That is money well spent in my book.
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