Super Stock

I love making stock so much that it's probably the most enjoyable part of cooking a chicken. It's cheap, delicious, can be altered in a thousand ways so it's never dull, and is the basis of innumerable great dishes.


With the carcass of a roast chicken to use up last week it actually fell to the Dear Leader (may her detractors shrivel like salted slugs) to start the stock off, a rare foray into the kitchen other than in an advisory capacity. To the carrots, onions, ginger and bay leaves she had incorporated I added a few rather tired but usable sticks of celery, a head of our own garlic, one of the few left from a disappointing season, and a load of spices - black cardamom pods, red and black peppercorns, some coriander seed, a star anise, some allspice berries... The more flavour you put in, the more you get out.


Once the initial albumen scum has been cleared from the surface, watching it give occasional little blips is a therapeutic exercise, repeated over a good two and a half hours as the liquid simmers ever so gently to maximise the flavour without clouding up. The aroma wafting up through the house is another mood lifter. And of course the end product is life-enhancing - tasty, complex, savoury, like a good wine but without the after-effects. As soon as the cooking is over I like to strain the liquid off the veg and bones, as left to cool on them it can develop some stale undertones.


As you'd expect with an ingredients list like that, the first use I made of the finished article was in a Chinese dish, a mushroom and vegetable-rich noodle soup-cum-stew into which, inauthentically, we stirred spoonfuls of the Mexican-inspired chili sauce made by Sternest Critic to preserve our bumper chili crop remains. A good soup needs a very good stock - I recall (probably not for the first time, my apologies) Chris Johnson, then owner of The Village Restaurant in Ramsbottom, being very upset that having paid £20  (and this in the early Nineties) for a bowl of soup in an extremely famous French restaurant owned by an extremely famous French chef, the stock was watery and boring. It spoiled what should have been - if critics were to be believed - the meal of a lifetime.


No such problem with our bowl of Chinese-y goodness. It was warmly spicy, onion sweet, and deep in colour and flavour. Satisfying to the palate, soothing on the stomach, and warming for the soul - and for pennies.

Malaysian Cooking

As part of my day job last Saturday I attended the Ning cookery school in Manchester's trendy Northern Quarter. For full details if anyone is interested check out Lancashire Life's April edition, and maybe their website in the fullness of time, but a couple of things were of particular interest to the austerity cook so I'll include them in this blog.

Firstly was how to use lemon grass. I had always thought that trimming and then bashing the moist core with the flat of a knife was the way, removing the fibrous bits after they had given up their flavour: not so as Norman Musa demonstrated. We trimmed the pieces are I had previously done, then cut them in short lengths and zapped them with water in a food processor. Wonderful smell, maximum flavour and fragrance, most bang for your ringgit.

The other was the power of toasted spice. I sometimes do this, in a hot dry pan with one whole spice. Norman had us measure decent quantities of several: cumin, pepper, cinnamon bark, cardamom and star anise (broken into small bits), then got us toasting them gently for a couple of minutes before grinding them finely. The mixture of spices again filled the room, and there was certainly more flavour imparted to the food because of this technique.

I'm off to my local Chinese supermarket tonight to buy some supplies. Fresh and relatively simple street food (this was for beginners) it was nonetheless delicious, and even in the Far East in my previous career I never smelled anything so mouth-watering.

The Joy of Stocks

Making stock is one of life's simplest culinary pleasures. It fills the house with a comforting smell (unless it's lamb, which I tend not to bother with), and as a near freebie warms the heart of the austerity cook.

Earlier in the week with son suffering with severe yoot flu I made a chicken broth for our evening meal having prepared the stock in the afternoon using the well-picked carcase of a roast bird. Anyone who believes there is no difference between real stock and a cube has yet to make the real stuff. Same son, aka Sternest Critic, can always tell if I make risotto with the cheaty option.

Yesterday I got around to making some beef stock with the bones and bits from Sunday's roast. It was getting near the time when I would no longer trust it, and Friday being shopping day we needed to clear some room in the fridge. Chicken stock I make in about an hour, as simmered too long it can go a bit gluey; beef can bubble modestly for three or four hours.

The bones were joined by four bay-leaves, a large onion quartered, two sticks of celery and the leaves of several more, a carrot in thick diagonal slices (to give plenty of surface area), with several cloves of garlic, about 12 peppercorns, and two flowers of star anise. Not sure if that is what they should be called but they look like it. Three hours - and a half-teaspoonful of salt - later we have the liquid makings of a Chinese noodle soup, kept in the fridge overnight so the beefy fat can be skimmed off (and probably used in cooking something else, or maybe just on a sliver of toast).

Years ago Chris Johnson, who in Ramsbottom since the 1980s has run the best restaurant in the North West under various different names - the original was The Village Restaurant - told us about a trip to I think a Paul Bocuse eaterie. He had been terribly disappointed, and was scathing about a soup tried there, with as he put it 'no depth' to the stock. He seemed saddened that such a hero of the food world should have erred in so basic a fashion. That depth is in fact really easy to achieve even in the home kitchen, so I can understand Chris's dismay, leaving aside what had been paid for the bowlful.

Cheapo Chinese

Saturday night as so often was Chinese feast night, but with a twist - it was the first of our campaign for two veggie evening meals (or nearly) a week. One of my favourite things from takeaway Chinese meals is stewed mushrooms which I reproduced as a dish last night, simplicity itself, also cheap thanks to a big buy of mega 'shroom box at Morrison's.

Quartered fungi lightly fried then finished in soy sauce and cheaty chicken cube stock, thickened with cornflour and pepped up with star anise, and stewed for ages on a very low heat to infuse the flavour. The lot cost maybe £1, which compares well with the £2.50 at least that it would cost if bought in.

I love mushrooms, and they are one of the few foods that don't seem to have shot up in price recently - homegrown, not very demanding, and doubtless hefty competition for the supermarket slot stopping producers from pushing prices upwards. Bought in big boxes they are a bargain too. Memo to self, eat more mushrooms on veggie nights, and not just risotto either.

Re-Train Your Gravy

Too convoluted a title?

A simple idea for using up surplus gravy - so about 12 million households currently then - beyond the traditional moistening of turkey sarnies.

On the 20th we committed a major sin against the austerity cannon by buying in Chinese - I can blame my visiting father whose idea it was. The next day, though we had imbibed very modestly, both my wife and I felt headachey, maybe the MSG at fault. So we prefer homemade, and a soup should always be part of any Chinese banquet (when you attend posh ones you get several), thus on the 27th I made the following as part of a full Chinese meal.

I had half a gravy-boat of beefy goodness from Christmas Day (as we had a small piece of sirloin to go with the turkey crown). A chopped onion and finely diced carrot were fried until the onion was taking on a hint of colour, then a huge clove of garlic in the thinnest slices was added along with a de-seeded chili, and the gravy poured over the lot. Topped up with water and spiced with plenty of star anise and 5-spice the soup was simmered for 20 minutes, then a handful of sirloin in cubes and the same amount of sweetcorn kernels dropped in, and finally some pre-soaked noodles.

It's a recipe with endless variations possible, but the core of the thing is the affinity of beef and star anise.

Star Star Anise

Home-made Chinese food too often focuses on stir fries to the exclusion of many more interesting methods and recipes. In my past life I got to travel in China, Taiwan and various Asian countries where the Chinese tended to dominate business (as they soon will around the world). A frequent favourite dish on those travels was variations on beef soup flavoured with star anise, the best being made with oxtail.

I have since found that a passable imitation can be made with leftover beef gravy (real gravy, not the stuff made with powder) or the juices from a beef stew. On Saturday we had one such, started as ever with a gently fried chopped onion, to which a finely chopped red chilli was added before the sieved juices of a stew from two days earlier were poured in and two whole star anise and a couple of big chunks of ginger were plopped in to simmer nicely for the best part of an hour (the few scraps of meat added at the last minute to avoid them going stringy along with a ready softened nest of noodles).

Not haute cuisine, but a good element of a Chinese meal that had the twin virtues of tasting great and costing next to nothing. Made with leftovers but there were no leftovers afterwards this time.