kitchen alchemy: trash into gold

i love making soup, be it a spoonful of red miso dissolved in hot water with a handful of spinach thrown in, or a complicated multi-step, multiple hour long recipe with a foot long ingredient list. soup is rad because you can eat tons of it and not get too full, and because it warms up your body and makes you feel safe. soup is rad because you can make a monster batch of it and eat it all week long, and unlike most leftovers, it actually gets better as it sits idly in your fridge. it's magic! no, actually it's science, and this is the dime store explanation: as soup gets older (not too old, mind you -if it smells funny, it might be time to toss it) the starches in it break down into sugars, so the flavor deepens and the texture gets richer.

dude, it's a huge cop out to use bouillon cubes or packaged vegetable broth when making soup. you can't really say a soup is made from scratch when the broth is a processed, sodium bloated dry cube. even using the fancy vegan kinds just always made me feel like sort of a faker. and please understand, i am not judging anyone who uses bouillon as a shortcut - in fact, and i'll admit it now to the world, that's all i have ever used. i don't feel particularly proud of that, but i can really be a sucker for convenience. no more! the time has come to evolve as a cook, and mainly inspired by my friend/co-worker/jam master janina, i recently embarked on the journey known as making your own broth.

there are a lot of cooking projects out there that seem really intimidating until you actually just do them. perhaps this struggle extends into life outside the kitchen as well...it is so easy to build things up in your mind until they are bigger than you, bigger than your will, until they mock you with cartoon monster laughter. and as i've so often realized (and yet, so often seem to forget), once you turn to face these things with some steely resolve, they aren't such a big deal after all. for instance, i used to wish desperately that i could make homemade seitan, assuming for some reason that i wouldn't be able to do it. and then one day, i just went for it, and it was super fun and easy and i never bought seitan from the store ever again. i used to proclaim that i "sucked" at baking, and hated how precise you had to be to make it work. then i started reading recipes more carefully and taking some chances, and started stocking the kitchen with higher quality baking ingredients. voila! muffins, scones, pies, cookies - now i make them all with little anxiety or self doubt.

so, vegetable stock was one of those intimidating things for me until janina broke it down: put a bunch of vegetable scraps in a pot with some water, spices and salt, and simmer the hell out of it. cool, strain, and that's it. that is it! for a week or two, every time you cook, save all the carrot and potato peels, onions and garlic paper, leek tops, squash guts and all the other veggie odds and ends that you normally trash or compost. i put mine in a big plastic container in the freezer, but you can use a plastic bag too. then, when you know you'll be home for a few hours, alchemize that shit into pure gold. i started my batch off with half an onion chopped sauteed for a few minutes with olive oil, mixed peppercorns, some bay leaves and a few pinches of dried rosemary. then i literally dumped my cache of veg scraps in (you have to use kind of a big pot), poured enough water in to cover the mess, and topped it off with some sea salt. i then brought it to a boil, turned it down to a simmer and let it do its thing for about 2.5 hours. what happens is the liquid vastly reduces, and the vegetables cook down into mush, imparting all their flavor crystals and vitamin power into the remaining water. i let it cool for awhile and then strained it into a container. i didn't mess with cheesecloth or any of that, just used a normal colander and that was that. now i have tons of vegetable stock (for the long term, i froze some in an ice cube tray), that will lend the delicious taste of victory to all the soups and sauces i'm going to make in the coming month. yes! yessssssss.

janina writes for a cool blog calls isgreaterthan, and back in november, did a super straightforward post about homemade vegetable stock. it really demystifies the process, and makes you feel like "yeah, i can do this." read it here! making stuff yourself instead of buying it from the store is maybe one of the greatest feelings there is, and kids, i'm riding high.


love,
emily

gem of a jam

my friend and co-worker janina (the brains/brawn behind local, small batch jam company, little isobel) gave me a late christmas gift today, presented in a small brown bag adorned with my name written in cursive. inside, i found 4 treasures - mostly edible, hurrah!! - all handmade and cute as can be. there was a beautiful, slender bottle of creamy, dreamy coquito (veganized, bless her dear heart), a jar of mincemeat, and a jar of sparkling bath salts scented with grown up oils like lavender and sandalwood.

but the kicker, the real cherry on top, was a teensy, tiny jar of alpine strawberry jam. it is so f-ing precious, i kind of can't handle it (i am an unabashed lover of needlessly tiny objects):

{it may be hard to
tell but this adorable
jar only holds
like 2 ounces}

as i soon learned (from the jam master herself), this jar is not needlessly tiny. it is, in fact, need-fully (or whatever) tiny, because apparently alpine strawberries are very rare and very, very expensive. they are so small and delicate, she explained, that they bruise at even the slightest rough touch. once bruised, they soon disintegrate and are then worthless. most farmers won't mess with the alpine strawberry because of the painstaking effort it takes to harvest them and the subsequent price that must be charged to compensate for the tedium and time consumption. lucky for us, janina's fav farmer paul has the guts to raise these tender babies, and janina has the guts to spend a whopping sum to obtain them.

i just now ate a wee spoonfull of this stuff and...whaaa!?! these dainty fruits do not produce a dainty flavor. the strawberry flavor is in there, but the taste is closer to candy than to a product of nature. janina described it as "a cross between smarties and a fruit roll up," and while i do detect those notes, there is also depth and intensity rarely found in those kinds of sweets. in fact, i don't think i've ever tasted anything like it, natural or synthetic. and like all little isobel jams and preserves, the texture is simply perfect, and the amount of sweetness is spot on - the woman can jam the shit out of some fruit! and thankfully, others are starting to take notice.

so i just wanted to share this special little treat with you all (thank you again j), and alert you of the wondrous gems known as alpine strawberries.

love,
emily