Vegetable Stock

One lesson I have learned in my time as a professional cook is the value of having lots of home-made stock on hand all the time.  Today I'm specifically talking about vegetable stock.

In the restaurant, we make and go through several gallons of vegetable stock every day.  It's in just about everything.  Not just a base for soups, vegetable stock is also used as a cooking liquid in place of water for most preparations. It imparts much more flavor into what you're cooking than plain water.  Rice, beans, quinoa, vegetable braises and poaches, faro, etc.  And using vegetable stock (instead of a meat-based stock) leaves the dish vegan and vegetarian friendly.

A second great value of vegetable stock is that you can use scraps to make it.  So it's highly economical.

When I make stock at home I always use certain base ingredients, then add whatever surplus of other veggies I have laying around.  The basics - carrots, onions, and celery. Some of the vegetables and scraps that are a good idea - mushrooms, leeks, fennel, greens, celery root, parsnips, turnips, cabbage, broccoli.  Next time you are prepping vegetables for a dish, save the trim.  The otherwise "inedible" throwaway parts.  Stems, tops, cores, etc, and use them to make stock.

Veggies for Stock

Peel and cut your carrots, onions, celery and other veg into large pieces.  Add about 2 tbsp vegetable oil to a stock pot over med heat.  Sweat the vegetables without any color.  Add enough water to cover the vegetables by about 2 inches.  Add parsley stems, a few sprigs of thyme, bay leaves, and 2-3 cloves of garlic.  Bring to a boil, then simmer for about 1 hour.  Strain the stock into containers and store for use.  Refrigerate, freeze or can/jar.

Veggie Fried Brown Rice

Here's a pretty easy, yummy, veggie-filled dish I made today.  The whole thing took about 20 minutes. Just like the pasta primavera of a previous post, fried rice is another way to increase the amount and variety of vegetables you eat. 

Veggie Fried Brown Rice

I used carrots, cabbage, broccoli, red bell peppers and mustard greens.  Cut the veggies into bite-sized pieces.  Heat 1-2 tbsp vegetable oil until it smokes.  Stir fry the veggies for about 4 minutes, adding minced garlic and ginger in the last 2 minutes.  Add cooked rice (I used brown because it's good for you). Stir fry for another 2-3 minutes.  Drizzle in a scrambled egg and toss for a minute. Cut the heat. Sprinkle with soy sauce (and sriracha if you like spice). Toss in toasted sesame seeds and serve.

I decided to describe how I made this dish, rather than give a "recipe".  This is the kind of dish that you can pretty much make however you want.  More veg, more rice, different veg, more egg, no egg, etc.  You get the idea.  I thoroughly encourage experimentation in the home kitchen until you stumble upon the formula that works best for you.  Then you can write your own recipe.  The important part here is to have fun, eat more vegetables, and incorporate more fresh, home cooking into your everyday food routines.

Enjoy!

Cooking Professionally vs Everyday Eating

I get a lot of comments about what kind of food I must eat on a daily basis.  These are largely based on the fact that I'm a formally trained professional cook, and I work in a sort of  "special occasion" kind of restaurant. I frequently hear "Oh!  You must eat *insert insanely rich, decadent, high-end food here* all the time . . ."  I'll leave you with an image of Eno Terra's lobster risotto with truffles as an example of what I supposedly eat every day:

Awesome dish!  I probably cooked this one about a hundred times when we were running this special off my station.  But let's be real!  If I ate this every day (or like this) I would be 400 pounds and dead broke.  This is restaurant food.  Expertly and painstakingly prepared, expensive but worth every penny, treat yourself on occasion restaurant food.

Which raises the questions - 1. What do I cook for myself on a regular basis? 2. And, is my husband really the luckiest son-of-a-gun on earth because he has something like the above waiting for him every night for dinner? 

Answers:  1. Very little.  I'm barely ever home to cook, and when I am, it's generally easy to prepare, light fare.  2.  Hell no.  Again, I'm barely ever home to cook, and he's usually the one going around trying to wrangle up something I can eat when I drag my tired ass home after dinner service.

My usual daily diet consists of some sort of stir fried vegetables tossed with a grain (pasta, rice, quinoa, beans, potatoes, etc) and occasionally meat.  There are also subs, burgers, Chinese food, and rotisserie chickens from the grocery store.  Throw in the occasional can of tuna, beef stew and braised chicken something, and that about sums up my daily food.  In fact, if you view the pasta primavera I have pictured in my previous post, that's a pretty good representation of my every day food.

I cook whenever I can.  Obviously not every day.  I do believe in avoiding as many processed products as possible.  So when I make my own food it's always as fresh and home-made as possible.  I make my own stocks and sauces.  I like to know what's in the food I'm eating.

Please allow me to leave you with images of a few typical quick and easy go-to foods on my days off:

Creamy Minestrone

 

Pasta Primavera

  

Zucchini and Eggplant Lasagna on the Grill

Chicken Cacciatore with Sauteed Green Beans



Pasta Primavera

I'm trying to incorporate more vegetables and healthy options into my everyday eating.  This came after my realizing that for the past 2 weeks or so I've been eating, basically, crap.

So, in the spirit of Meatless Monday today I decided to make a pasta primavera that would even leave the folks at "Crunch-a-Color" proud. 

Pictured here is the base for the dish.  It's cabbage, carrots,  red bell pepper, Brussels sprouts and broccoli sauteed with chili flakes, white wine, garlic, and 3-4 scoops of crushed tomatoes. Toss with cooked pasta, finish with a pat of butter and a hearty handful of sharp, grated Parmesan cheese.

Simple, healthy, and ready in about 45 minutes. 



Consider the Fork

I just finished reading this book.  A lot of fun and super interesting.  The author, Bee Wilson, explains the history behind the everyday kitchen tools, cooking vessels, utensils and appliances we use for cooking and eating.  Since the practice of eating is a significant part of daily life for every person the world over, the story of how we cook and eat is a rather comprehensive lesson in anthropology and cultural history.  

Italian Seafood Stew - Cacciucco

I made this as the first course for a small gathering of dinner guests one fine Sunday to celebrate the end of the Christmas season.  Cacciucco - an Italian (Livornese, to be exact) seafood stew.

I honestly and truly don't really know the difference content-wise between a cacciucco and a cioppino.  Just that the former is a dish of Livorno, and the latter a Mediterranean seafood stew first invented in San Francisco. 

Mine included 2 kinds of fish - black bass and perch, clams, mussels, and calamari. The soup base is fish stock and sofrito. 

To make the fish stock - Sweat aromatic vegetables in a stock pot.  I used carrots, onions, celery, leeks and fennel.  Add the bones from the fish that you will use in the stew.  Sweat some more.  Add about 1-2 cups dry white wine.  Let the raw alcohol cook out of the wine.  Cover the whole thing with water by an inch or 2.  Throw in parsley stems, thyme, 2-3 bay leaves, and a few black peppercorns. Let simmer for about an hour, skimming the foamy gunk off the top with a ladle every few minutes. Strain twice - first time though a colander, then through a fine mesh or chinois.

For the sofrito - Mince carrot, onion and celery in the food processor until very small pieces.  Simmer these in a pan covered with extra virgin olive oil for about 15-20 minutes.  Add canned tomatoes and continue to simmer for another 45 minutes to an hour, until the mixture looks well-cooked.  There should be a definite layer of olive oil on the top.  You can skim this oil off and reserve for another use later.

Pour the fish stock into the sofrito slowly until it is the flavor/consistency you want.  Adjust the seasoning to taste with salt and pepper.  You just made a brodetto. 

To complete the stew, ladle a nice amount of brodetto into a pan.  Heat to a boil.  Add the seafood one at a time, starting with the ingredient that requires the longest cook time.  I went with clams first, because they take a long time to open.  When the clams start to open, add the mussels. When the mussels start to open, add the fish (cut into small, bite-sized pieces).  About a minute later add the calamari.  Only let the calamari cook for about a minute.

Sprinkle with chopped parsley. Serve with crusty bread.

Cooking Professionally

Food for Every Day carries different meanings for different readers.  Today I'm starting a series of entries that discusses everyday stuff from the point of view of a professional cook.

When you cook for a living, especially on the dinner crew of a successful restaurant, your work hours are the complete opposite of everyone else's.  This is what I do.  I have noticed recently that most normal working folk with Mon-Fri 9-5 schedules have a hard time wrapping their heads around this idea. (No disrespect intended, as this is very understandable.)  However, since I recently started this career path, I've heard evidence of this from all angles. One particular conversation I had sums it up.

My work day starts at 2 or 3 in the afternoon.  I once mentioned this in front of an acquaintance who is an accountant by profession (Mon-Fri, 9-5), and she rather snarkily replied, "Huh!  You have the life! I wish I could start my workday at 2:00!" Maybe she would rethink if she realized a few facts about my daily schedule.

Sure, it's nice being able to sleep late every morning, as I am really not a morning person.  In fact, one of the things I hated about working a corporate job was having to be out of the house by 7 every morning.  So going in at 2pm sounds pretty cushy, right?    It would if my workday ended at 5:00 like hers.   Fact is, my workday barely starts by 5:00.  I get there at 2 some days, 3 other days.  I have 2-3 hours to set up my station and help cook dinner for the entire restaurant staff (usually this task is done by 2 of us).   Forty-five minutes to 1 hour to make dinner for about 30 employees.  And then the prep for whatever station I'm working that day.  It may include sauces, soups, stocks, hauling heavy equipment up and down stairs, cutting and sauteing pounds and pounds of vegetables, rolling and forming hand-made pasta, butchering chickens, cleaning and portioning fish, cutting steaks, making flatbread dough, etc.  All before 5pm.  From 5pm on, it's urgently cooking on the line, a la minute, for every table that sits in the dining room.  Depending on the night of the week, closing time is 9:30 or 11:00.  Around this time we all wrap, label and store unused food, carry trays of food and equipment downstairs to store in the walk-in fridges and/or freezer, break down our stations and scrub them with soap and metal scouring pads.  After this, we clean the walk-ins, moving food to appropriate locations, organizing, condensing and labeling food, sweeping and mopping the floors.  And then I get to go home.  I arrive home anywhere between 10:30 and midnight.

See, I may "sleep in" compared to most people.  But that doesn't mean that I'm a loafer, or that I choose to work part time.  I work 5 days a week, at least 8 hours a day like all other full time workers.