Chicken Noodle Soup can be good eats, too.  The secret is to embrace your Mennonite heritage.  Even if you don’t have one.

What I mean is that the secret is in the stock – you have to make your own to really kick chick-soup up to eleven.  Which, if you really think about it, is GREAT – because making your own stock is EASY and BASICALLY FREE.

Hokay, here’s what you’re gonna do.  You’re gonna get a gallon freezer bag, and you’re gonna put scraps in it from all the “mostly plants” and “real food” you’ve been eating.  So you’re having a nice celery and PB snack? Stick the ends you trim off in the freezer bag. Use carrots for something? The tops that you would usually throw away go in the bag. I had some junk from a leek I used,  scraps from some fennel I didn’t need, stalks from some parsley I choped up, junk like that.  It’s a great way to get rid of slightly-wilted, not-so-awesome-anymore veggies/herbs.  And meat bits.  Don’t forget the MEAT BITS.  Make something with a bone-in chicken breast, and then throw the bones and bits you don’t eat into the bag.  Throw fat you trimmed off a roast IN THE BAG.  If you’ve bought a whole chicken recently, it probably came with a neck and some organs (this is in fact a biological entity we’re talking about here. Don’t get grossed out on me). It goes in the freezer. In the bag.  What’s that?  You bought some shrimp and now you’ve got some shimpy shells and tails and stuff? You know what to do.

So basically, over a period of weeks or months, you just try to remember not to throw things out without thinking about stock first.  After a little while, probably right around the time you start to need more stock, you should have a nice little collection of stuff in your bag.  You put in in the biggest pot you have and add an onion (quartered).  Add 5-10 whole peppercorns, and fill it up to the top with water.  Don’t add salt.  You can always add salt later, but it’s purdy hard to get rid of it once you’ve put it in.  Bring it to a boil and then simmer for HOURS. Go play some Wii Fit or something.  Check it every now and then, maybe give it a little stir.  Add more water if you want.  The idea here is that more time is better, up to a point.  So whenever you decide you’re done, pour the stock into a bowl, through a strainer, and discard the veggie-meat junk.  The liquid is what you want.  After it cools a bid, measure it out and put 1 cup each in ziploc baggies, then freeze.  If you want, you can also fill an ice cube tray with the stuff, for smaller quantities.

So now you have this STUFF – which is basically yummy-infused water.  What do you do with it? Well, you make soup!  Or you use it to make cous cous!  Or…  if you’re doing a big skillet full of yummy kind of thing it usually calls for liquid, so use stock!  You can usually substitute stock pretty well for anything that calls for white wine without too many troubles.  Which is handy if you don’t want to use or don’t have any wine in the house.

Anyway, stock has flavor. Store-bought stock doesn’t have quite as much, but fools you into thinking it has flavor by adding a lot of salt.  Don’t be fooled. Make you own stock.  It’s worth it, I swear.

I’m sorry the photography sucks.  I never have enough light.  Contrary to what it looks like, this is NOT a breaded piece of offal.  It’s fish.  Tasty, tasty fish.

I call this “Kitchen Destroyer Cod.”  It’s another Cooks Illustrated recipe, which reliably kicks out recipes that are incredibly tasty, and occasionally more involved.  The breading on this sucker was huge and crispy and awesome, but it took a good deal of time to make, and dirtied about three dishes all by itself.  That’s why I call it the Kitchen Destroyer.  Here, have a look for your self. The black bean salad was a variation on an Alton Brown recipe, which kicked serious butt.

I’ve you’ve been playing along at home, you may have noticed a great deal of thyme being used in the past few recipes.  In fact, before I started the Foodblog, I had made French Onion soup, which ALSO used thyme.   So why all the thyme?  Because fresh herbs both ROCK and ARE EXPENSIVE.  Normally I try to grow my own, but I had to ditch my herb garden when we moved to North Carolina.  So when you have them, USE THEM.

The other thing of note with this mean is the fish.  Fish is great.  I love fish.  So do a lot of other people.  Lots of people have become really good at fishing, actually.  So much so, that populations are starting to crash.  Food doesn’t taste good if you know you’re doing damage by eating it.  So what you do is check out the Monterey Bay Aquarium website and print out their pocket guide and stick it in your wallet.  And use it.  Kroger and the like don’t always do a good job of telling you where your food comes from (and their seafood isn’t the freshest either), so your best bet is something more like a Trader Joes, or a local Fishmonger.  As my buddy Ian pointed out below, Trader Joes still sells fish like Orange Roughy that just can’t be fished sustainably – so you can’t buy without thinking here.  But it has been my experience that it is easier to find seafood that meats the Monterey Bay Aquarium guidelines here than at mass-market grocery stores.  It’s a complex issue, which is why you NEED to print out the pocket guide and tuck it in your wallet.  That should be a good guide.  If your store won’t tell you where it came from, go somewhere else.

Maybe you don’t really care too much about fish populations, but I think you should.  We’re running low on a lot of fish.  Consider orange roughy; this is one ugly bugger of a fish that we couldn’t catch until recently, because it lives so far down below.  Why are we bothering with this fish if its so hard to catch?  Because we’re starting to wipe out the easier fish species.  Oops.  The problem with orange roughy is that they can live to about 150 years old.  The fish you’re eating for dinner is older than you.  Couple that with their sporadic breeding habits, and you’ll find that there is practically NO sustainable way to eat this fish.  It will just be gone.

At any rate, there’s a good deal to this issue, and I suggest you listen to this really good Teri Gross interview if you’re interested.  Fish is so good, it would be a shame to crash it to oblivion.

Roughly based off this Martha Stewart recipe, if you also make chicken with it. Martha knows her roasted veggies – my recipe for oven roasted Brussels sprouts was one of hers originally.

This one is a win.  Kristin likes it too.  Yay.

Ed – I’ve decided to call this recipe “Why don’t I have any white wine on hand with which to make a pan sauce?” Chicken.  Because lord knows that would have just killed this sucker.