Anyone else feel like 2024 hit a tires-smoking-broad-slide into the 31st? No, just me? Okay ... Welp. I had such high hopes for a quiet, and a total bore-me-to-tears Winter that did not, in fact, come to pass, but if I can be totally annoying for a minute and reach for the "lesson" here, I'd say through it all it's become obnoxiously, if not, painfully clear how important fueling my body for the task (whatever that may be) is, and has inspired me to do a lot more of the cooking from scratch that I've (regrettably) gotten away from in the last couple of years. And I thought I'd get back to sharing a little of that with you here, furthermore, why not make our fist day, today, National Quitter's Day. Anyone who's fallen off the wagon, made their resolutions, already broke them, thinking about backing out of them, or if you just plain haven't even begun (uhm that one would be me this year - heh, you can't quit something you haven't started yet!), then this is your sign to get on track, and do the thing(s) your heart is begging you to do.
To start things off, I'm sharing my very own recipe for homemade vegetable stock, the foundation of most of the soups, and stews I make. How about we just get to the recipe, and we can hash out the reasons later.
Souper Duper Veggie Broth
Here's what you need:
1 Potato - washed, eyed, and quartered
1/2 Onion
1 Carrot - cut into thirds
1 Heaping teaspoon Minced Garlic
Pinch of Red Pepper Flakes
1 Bay Leaf
1 Star Anise
1 teaspoon Pink Himalayan Salt
1/2 teaspoon Cumin, ground
1/4 teaspoon Oregano, crushed leaf
1/8 teaspoon Thyme, ground
1/8 teaspoon Rosemary, crushed leaf
1/8 teaspoon Sage, ground
Dab of Ginger Root, freshly grated
Here's what you do:
Throw all of the above in a 5-7 quart pot, fill with water, bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover & simmer for an hour. Remove from heat, strain, and use immediately, or store for up to a week in the fridge.
That's it!
Ok, so why make your own when it's pretty cheap and readily available? For me, it boils down to allergies, and taste. If you're a regular around here you already know I have, like, a billion food allergies and sensitivities I'm always tip-toeing and making recipe substitutions around. I also just really love the way this broth tastes in my final concoctions. Trust me, no one is more surprised than I am that I've become a broth-snob, but here we are. I never thought I'd be that person, but the last soup I made with store-bought stock just did not do it for me ... and the best part is, you can take the saddest looking vegetables that are right on death's doorstep and give them a whole new life by boiling the living hell out of them. Plus, if you're a mutant like me, you can take this recipe, and make veggie / herb substitutions and sprinkle your own magic on it to make it the workhorse of your recipe box, too! In my opinion, this broth is a solid building block that really brings body to the flavor of whatever you're using it in without overpowering your dish in the end. I hope you'll try it out, play around with it, or feel motivated to create your own brand new recipe.
If you've read through this thinking, "I can do better than that..." DO IT! Do it, and write it down ... tell a friend ... tell the world. Do it, and email it to me, please, I might like a crack at it! If your grandmother has a better recipe, and you're lucky enough to get your oven mitts on it? GOOD! Use it, share it, don't let the knowledge disappear. One thing I found disconcerting over the holidays was when I got a couple of minutes to myself and sat down to click through some of my bookmarked recipes, just how many had evaporated into dead links ... and not just the page the recipe lived on, but entire blogs and websites ...
Poof!
Granted, I've been at this a long time, I understand we're no longer in that weird heyday of blogging bliss, I mean, I never was to begin with because my page was never structured to be a money-maker. Yep, that's right, I do this shit for free! Just me screaming into the abyss, and the few ragtag readers I've managed to pick up along the way (I honestly don't know why you come here, or put up with me, but I see you & love ya for it). Anyway, the landscape has changed a lot in the last twenty years, this could be a good time to dive into the weeds of what makes a blog "authentic" blog, or whatever, but I'll spare you. The point is, at its height, a lot of popular blogs made the move to sites the owners had to pay in order to host their content, and I guess when life got in the way, or they slowed down for whatever reason, or were edged out by online personalities that made blogging their entire existence, and the ad money dried up it just wasn't worth keeping the content available. That's why I always kept this joint free - free for me, free for you (because damn the man, and hack the planet, and all that)... I'd already seen bloggers falling by the wayside in the early twenty-teens because they'd made the move to paid hosting and thought they'd always be able to factor it into their budget, and then one day it's all just ... gone. Now, I suppose I could've tried The Wayback Machine before I just up and deleted all of my bookmarks, however, in that moment I guess I just lost that lovin' feelin' and moved on, but I have to be honest about feeling the sting of the loss. So between dead links, and blogs that are so antiquated and plastered with ads that pop-up, or play videos, or send a man to your house to play the trombone on your front porch all whilst freezing our mobile devices (WHAT IS GOING ON?!?!), it has motivated me to dust off ye old printer, and get back to making hard copies of all of my favorites, because we never know when the power might go out, or a website goes bye-bye, or the next disaster strikes, or you throw your iPad through your kitchen window because you can not cope with one more motherf, I mean, more than mildly irritating ad, or you're sick of reading what would amount to thirty pages of text about why some random blogger hates her mother before getting to the gluten-free sheet cake recipe barely mentioned at the bottom of the post.
For me, 2025 will be the year of simplifying. What will it be for you?
xoxo
