You Don't Have to be a Domestic Goddess to Make Homemade Broth

Homemade Broth

When you think of stock, which of these comes to mind? 

I used to buy stock as a staple. It has about a thousand uses, not least of which is making homemade, custom-seasoned soups in 30 minutes. As I've gotten more and more aware of how many insane things are in our food chain (thank you to every parent of a child with significant allergies that I've ever met, for starters), I got a lot more careful about reading labels. I expected to see something like "water, chicken bones, carrots, celery, onions, salt, pepper, and seasonings" when I read the ingredients list, but here's what I actually found:

...and that's for a premium brand stock! Sugar? Yeast? Organic chicken flavor? What IS organic chicken flavor?

The same brand discloses the ingredients list of their beef broth as follows:

• Beef Stock (Water, beef stock powder)
• Beef Extract
• Autolyzed Yeast Extract
• Sea Salt
• Garlic Powder

I don't know what "beef stock powder" or (especially) "beef extract" are, and I'm not sure I want to. According to Livestrong, autolyzed yeast extract is a kinda-sorta natural form of monosodium glutamate (MSG) and is used in the same way. Many other brands actually use MSG; Campbell's discloses the following list of ingredients on their beef broth:

• Beef Broth
• Yeast Extract
• Salt
• Hydrolyzed Yeast Protein
• Monosodium Glutamate
• Caramel Color
• Hydrolyzed Soy Protein
• Hydrolyzed Wheat Gluten
• Dextrose
• Flavoring (This one right here is a personal favorite. Why even bother???)

Just tackling one word that occurs in this list three times, hydrolysis, according to Livestrong,

Hydrolysis is a method of extraction that boils the soy protein in a vat of sulfuric acid. Manufacturers mix the resulting acidic substance with caustic soda to neutralize the acid content. While hydrolyzed soy protein contains most of the nutrients and health benefits of soy, when you consume this type of soy you also consume the unhealthy chemical byproducts of the manufacturing process. According to "Soy Protein and Formulated Meat Products," the potential harm of consuming hydrolyzed soy protein comes directly from the hydrolyzation process.

Um. Ick.

(Note that I'm choosing Livestrong as a resource for this information because it's very readable and has external links that can refer readers to more scientific sources if they so desire.)

Caramel coloring is another one of those "ingredients" that has a wide range of uses and a varying range of toxicity, with certain forms of it listed among those products disclosed as potentially carcinogenic or reproductive toxicity. Regulating agencies recognize four classes of caramel coloring based on their manufacturing process, but since packaging only discloses "caramel coloring" without disclosing which class, the consumer has no means of knowing if s/he is consuming a relatively benign form or a much more toxic version. (See the Wikipedia link for more information.)

OK, so I can never buy packaged broths again. But I still love my speedy soups, and broth is still a foundational ingredient in a lot of home cooking. So. Here's the solution.

1. Get your self a nice-sized container that you don't mind dedicating to the freezer. For this purpose, I don't mind plastic since the fact that it will be living its life in the freezer means that the chance of chemical leeching into my foods is significantly reduced. I do not like freezer bags because they can't be reused, and the Zero Waste Home groupie in me objects to them. But as a size guide, the gallon-sized bags would be about the volume you're looking for in your container.
2. Every time you plan a meal around a meat item, try to make it a bone-in version. In fact, even if it's going to be a boneless dish (like a nice chicken piccata, yum), buy the bone-in version. It's less expensive than the boneless purchase and you can put those bones to good use.
3. Whether you have the bones left over at the end of the meal or take them out as part of your prep, toss the bones in the nice big container in your freezer. I usually mix pork and chicken in one container (makes for a lovely, rich stock) and keep the beef bones separate. If you have roasted (or bought) a whole chicken, put the entire carcass in there, including any aromatics that might have been in the cavity. You can add the skin as well, if you'd like, but keep in mind that it's going to add a lot of fat to the broth that will need to be skimmed off. Additionally, I usually keep salt out of my stocks so I can manage the taste of my finished soups; skins, especially of bought rotisserie chickens, are generally highly seasoned, so you'll want to take that into account as well.
4. Hopefully, every week the night before trash day you do a fridge clean-out. During that fridge clean out, you will inevitably come across a couple of carrots or celery stalks that are floppy and not that appealing, but not really so bad off that they need to be tossed. Great! Pop those in the bowl with your bones. Every time you stem mushrooms, pop those in the bowl. Garlic, ginger, and leftover herbs all play beautifully in homemade broths. 
5. When your bowl is full, put the entire contents in your slow cooker, add a few peppercorns, any other aromatics you might not have put into your freezer container, and top off the crock with plain cold tap water. If your container had only bones and you're making the stock for a specific recipe, it can be helpful to check that recipe for specific aromatics -- carrots, celery, leeks, onions, garlic, ginger, etc. -- that might help to make your finished product really stellar.
6. Turn the crockpot on Low and let it cook 12-24 hours, or on High 6-12 hours. 

I have a six-quart crock pot, so when I cook like this I end up with a little more than four quarts of stock. I keep mine in mason jars. I usually use up my stock quick enough that it's not necessary to freeze, but if you make yours to freeze, be cautious about your containers. I learned the hard way that mason jars sometimes crack in the freezer (I think I have better success freezing in mason jars when they've chilled overnight in the refrigerator first). It is possible to buy BPA-free freezer containers, or you can just use your delicious ingredient in the same week that you make it.

Note that a beautifully made stock like this one will yield a high gelatin content (from the bones) so when it is cold it really will look like a semi-congealed meat Jello, which sounds awful. But once you heat it in your soup, it will be flavorful, rich, and satisfying. 

Bon Appetit!!

Right-Sizing: Or, I Am Not a Minimalist

Well, the Big House has found a buyer.  Everything that's still in it either comes to the Little House, the storage unit, or out into the world.

In theory, everything except the art on the walls, some of the furniture, and the wedding china could leave my possession.  In theory.

A few years ago, I was participating in a local online-only moms club.  The online-only part is important; women said some of the most amazing, outrageous things under the mighty thin anonymity of a username like "MindyA" or "EllasMom."  Cris-de-coeur like "Am I ever going to get my waist back?" or "At what age did YOUR baby sleep at night?" were interspersed with outrageously personal details about their sex lives, their (or their husbands') DUIs, nanny problems, mother-in-law problems, and requests for gardeners.  And of course, repeated complaints about The Mess.

I doubt I need to explain The Mess.  But since I do need to vent, I will share what our Mess currently consists of:

• Toy cars
• Various jump ropes
• Move debris (books, etc. that had been used for staging but can now come home to Mama)
• Quentin's "Writing Office" where he is conducting his Write On Mamas writing class -- this is a big plastic tool chest thingy with paper & pencils on top.  The boys are numbering all the rooms in the house, except the living room, which has been designated the Write On Mamas Conference Room.  Quentin says he is On Writing Duty.
• Various shoes and dirty socks
• Backpacks
• School work that they are returning for my inspection which I have not yet inspected
• Folded laundry on the couch -- usually it's not folded, but I spiffed the place up for y'all
• Miscelleneous detritis that I'm not willing to admit to

So, every happy family I know has a Mess.  And everybody complains about the Mess.  And it popped up regularly on the forum.  Complaining about the Mess was always a hot topic, with responses usually wordy and ranging from some variation of "don't worry about it, enjoy your kids while they're little" to "I make the kids clean up each type of toy or game before they move on to the next one" (which I personally object to, but probably that person doesn't have items on her Mess list that she won't admit).  

There was one exception, one time.  The response consisted of a single line:

zerowastehome.blogspot.com

Well, that's almost like God sending you a little text message cutting through all that wordy crap and saying "CHECK OUT THIS BLOG."

So of course I did.  

Now, if you are remotely interested in being green, or reducing your waste, you have probably encountered Bea Johnson and her family.  She's been all over the place in the last two years: the Today show, People magazine, the New York Times and Sunset magazine, to name her highest profile appearances (sorry, the link to the Sunset article was password protected; check your library for the December 2010 issue).  I went a little cross-eyed looking at the blog, at first, not understanding if I was seeing what I was really seeing, so then I clicked over to the New York Times article.

That entire article had an impact on me, and it all started with this paragraph:

It’s like some kind of amazing magic trick. Bea has a husband, two sons (ages 10 and 8) and a dog, and yet her household generates no empty containers, no food scraps, no dirty paper towels, no broken toys, no crumpled wrapping paper, no empty ketchup packets from fast-food restaurants, no orphan socks with holes in the toes. 

Nothing.

Ever.

Doesn't that sound beautiful?  Amazing?  Magical, as the article says?

Yes.  Yes, it does.

Imagine a life without the mess.

...

WAKE UP!!


Yes, back to reality.  Back to where Bea Johnson has led where I can't follow.

The thing is, in addition to being nearly zero waste, she's also a true minimalist.  There is a pretty detailed inventory of her house over the course of her blog entries, and it's impressive.

Her house is beautiful.  It's all white, with little pops of orange, which is one of my favorite colors.  And it is, as described, utterly uncluttered.  If you toodle around on her blog you'll find lots of places where she details all the things she got rid of and why she found them unnecessary.

But as I have been packing away many of my belongings, the ones that were used to stage the house and give it personality, I have realized that, although many of those things have little real value, I do find them beautiful.  I am sad to be packing them up with no sense of when I might see them again.

Can I live without the little Fiestaware vase & cherub arrangement that I seem to create in each of my homes?  For sure.  But somehow, seeing the green vase and the cherub holding the (fake) mistletoe ball, which I'm sure Bea Johnson would find too tacky for words, makes me feel... I don't know... at home.  I mean, I've occupied five dwellings in the twelve years that those items have been part of my life, so they certainly have more permanence to me than any building has had.

Can I live without my John Lennon calendar hanging over my desk?  Well, yes.  I have only had it since November (and couldn't even hang it till March, owing to the Big House being staged).  But it calls to mind a set of memories that wouldn't need to surface otherwise: looking at a big painting of John in New York City, priced at $14,000, at some ridiculous store at the Mirage in Las Vegas, laughing with my husband about "maybe someday" -- and then coming back to the hotel room later to find that he'd bought me the calendar, the cover of which is the photo that inspired the painting.  That weekend, when everything was smooth and easy and not distracted by children or house stuff.  It reminds me of how much my husband, who doesn't usually buy me flowers but got the John Lennon calendar and 82% cacao chocolate bars, knows and and loves me.  With all these children and projects, it can be easy to stop noticing that.

Could I  live without my wedding china?  The fruit dishes from Jeff's grandmother?  The brown linen chair with the broken leg?  Yes.  Yes.  Yes again.  Some of it I even want to release into the world.

But somehow, parting with the Big House, and the easy stuff (half our possessions, almost), is enough. I'm beginning to feel a sense of loss.  I don't want to lose momentum on this project, so I think I have done Enough.  I will keep my (number withheld) pairs of shoes, my (too many) skirts and dresses, the (not going to admit) books about Virginia Woolf and the Beatles and England, and each of my children's coming-home-from-the-hospital newborn outfits.

But just because I keep those things today doesn't mean I have to make that same decision tomorrow.

Garbology

"Why are you reading that?" my husband asked.  "It's only going to upset you."

"No, I heard the author on NPR," I said.  "He made some great points and sounded really factual.  It'll be fine."

"I think you're crazy," my husband answered.

He had a point.  I've had more than one meltdown over green guilt in the 4 1/2 years that we've lived in the Bay Area, where going green sometimes feels like a competitive sport.  My anxiety about doing the right thing hit an extended high beginning in February 2010, when I discovered The Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson.  Johnson's family of four produces about a quart of trash annually, and I tried to eat the elephant by jumping in where she was rather than where I am in the whole zero waste householding business.  It made me an exhausted, emotional, self-hating wreck.

I have since scaled back my efforts quite a lot, and our family of five now makes about one kitchen-sized bag of trash per week (but lots of recyclables).  I'm pleased with our progress, but before I determined what our next steps ought to be, I wanted to be better informed about what changes would have the greatest positive impact.   Which is why the NPR interview of Edward Humes, author of Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash caught my attention.

In the interview, Humes was talking about Bakelite, an early plastic that was used for billiard balls, piano keys, and telephones  -- things that were meant to be durable, and have long, even heirloom-length, lives. He was calm and reasoned, not casting blame but describing a shift in the way materials are used as being problematic.  It was impersonal, informative, and assumed intelligence from the audience.

Still feeling cautious, I downloaded a sample onto my Kindle.  Humes opens the book with an anecdote of elderly hoarders, Jesse & Thelma Gaston, who had been trapped in their own home, by their own trash, for three weeks.  He moves further into the story of trash by describing other hoarders, the condition of hoarding, and the media attention it has received in the last few years.  His punchline is startling:

But little if any thought is given to the refuse itself, or to the rather scarier question of how any person, hoarder or not, can possibly generate so much trash so quickly.

Of course, there's a reason for this blind spot: namely, the amount of junk, trash, and waste that hoarders generate is perfectly, horrifyingly normal.  It's just that most of us hoard it in landfills instead of living rooms, so we never see the truly epic quantities of stuff that we all discard.  But make no mistake: The two or three years it took the Gastons to fill their house with five to six tons of trash is typical for an American couple.  (page 3/location 106)

He follows this assertion with a discussion of how much trash the average American generates daily, coming up with an average lifetime production of 102 tons of trash.  There is a reasonably detailed discussion of how one estimates that amount, and multiple illustrations for how much 102 tons really is.    Aircraft carriers are involved.  Which is kind of scary, when you are talking about one person's trash.

Humes then poses three questions:  What is the nature and cost of that 102-ton monument of waste?  How is it possible for people to create so much waste without intending to do so, or even realize they are doing it? Is there a way back from the 102-ton legacy, and what would that do for us... or to us? (pages 11-12)  These three questions form the organizing principles of the book.

Part 1: The Biggest Thing We Make describes how America deals with trash, how it has been dealt with in the past, and some "paths not taken" in the history of American waste management.  He talks about the concept of waste and wastefulness, how our natural sense of thrift was overcome by early mid-century advertisers (fans of Mad Men might find this familiar territory), and how the political climate defeats promising policies.  The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is discussed in (rather depressing) detail.  Humes corrected my misconception, a common one, he asserts, that the Garbage Patch (not to mention the other gyres collecting plastic trash in the other oceans) is not an "island" of trash, but a chowder of plastic bits with floating detergent bottles and milk cartons and old toys floating around what ought to be a pristine blue surface thousands of miles from anywhere.

Part 2: The Trash Detectives was perhaps the most depressing section of the book.  It's the shortest, because it's the area involving the greatest number of unknowns.  It goes against what we might assume, that "someone out there" knows what happens to the cans we put in the recycling, or the printer cartridges that we drop off at Office Depot, but in fact there is not really a clear, readily followable chain for where stuff goes when we're done with it (except the landfill) as there is for how to get it into our hands.  Humes does a great job of detailing exactly what is and is not known about trash after its useful life, and although the information itself is depressing, his prose never is.  It's informative and occasionally incredulous, but always readable and factual; he is one of us, which is to say, he doesn't exempt himself from the problem.

Part 3: The Way Back was... maybe not so much empowering, given how thoroughly Humes detailed the scope of the problems our trash poses, but certainly hopeful.  "Pick of the Litter" details a San Francisco dump and artist-in-residence program that talks about how much is found in the dump, but also how much potential there is for the stuff in there as actual materials.  "Chico and the Man" recounts the efforts of a small entrepreneur to create a new kind of reusable shopping bag, and to educate people on the environmental benefits of avoiding plastic shopping bags -- and the gigantic lawsuit that was mounted against him by the plastic bag industry -- and how it was defeated.  The remainder of the section talks about the efforts communities around the world and one Marin County, California family of four (Bea Johnson's family) has been working to reduce their waste, one innovative idea at a time.

If you're interested in treading lightly on the Earth, this book will be interesting and informative.  If you've never thought about it before, it's a reasonable place to start; Humes makes a very good case for remaking ourselves into a less wasteful culture as being good for us personally, as well: with less stuff, and better stuff, we can do more, save more, be financially more secure and nationally more secure.  The materials we have in our landfills are resources we've paid for and then discarded as though they are valueless.  Humes makes a powerfully readable case for the value of our resources, and for renewing our natural tendency to thrift.