{"id":68,"date":"2014-05-27T07:50:45","date_gmt":"2014-05-27T07:50:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brothersbites.com\/?p=68"},"modified":"2014-05-28T09:55:36","modified_gmt":"2014-05-28T09:55:36","slug":"stock-and-awe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brothersbites.com\/?p=68","title":{"rendered":"Stock and Awe"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"stock\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hey Dan,<\/p>\n

While you’re living high on the hog, I’m getting back to basics. After all the travel there’s a serious need to lose some weight, so the exercise has been ramped up, and the calories consumed reduced.<\/p>\n

One favourite for the weight-loss diet is soup. It sates an appetite and can be healthy too, depending on the ingredients. Tonight it’s pea soup with mint, so that checks all the boxes.<\/p>\n

But first, I need some stock.<\/p>\n

A long, long time ago I gave up on store-bought stock or cubes. Convenient they may be, but typically an ingredient list looks like this: Wheat flour, salt, flavour enhancers (monosodium glutamate, disodium 5′-ribonucleotides), yeast extract, glucose syrup solids, chicken fat, potato starch, sugar, chicken extract, flavouring (contains celery), onion extract, colour (ammonia caramel). That’s from Oxo<\/a>, but may as well be any of them.<\/p>\n

So that’s flour, salt, sugar, fat and chemicals. Mmmmm, ammonia caramel: Just like Grandma used to make.<\/p>\n

Really, I have no interest in eating something that sounds as though it was scraped off a vessel in a toilet cleaner factory.<\/p>\n

So today’s stock day. Easy: A couple of chicken carcasses; some old chook bones saved from other meals and frozen; some celery; an onion; a couple of carrots; a few bay leaves; salt and pepper; water. Simmer for a few hours, skim, strain (remembering you’re reserving the liquid and not the solids \u2013 I absent-mindedly tipped the stock down the sink one day. Doh!).<\/p>\n

Viola: chicken stock. No artificial ingredients, loads of flavour, and it costs a couple of dollars. I divide it into Ziplock bags in two-cup portions and freeze them, and one pot of stock lasts me for a month or two for soups or risottos or whatever.<\/p>\n

There’s only one problem. While it’s simmering, the whole house fills with a superb chicken\/bay leaf aroma and it is mouth-watering. It takes some serious self-restraint not to raid the fridge, and that would defeat the purpose somewhat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hey Dan, While you’re living high on the hog, I’m getting back to basics. After all the travel there’s a serious need to lose some weight, so the exercise has been ramped up, and the calories consumed reduced. One favourite for the weight-loss diet is soup. It sates an appetite and can be healthy too, … Continue reading Stock and Awe<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[61,63,66,65,62,64],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home-cooking","tag-chicken-stock","tag-diet","tag-recipe","tag-soup","tag-stock-cubes","tag-weight-loss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brothersbites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brothersbites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brothersbites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brothersbites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brothersbites.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.brothersbites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brothersbites.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brothersbites.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brothersbites.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}