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Cold weather = bring on the soups!

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Dharma:
The secret to a good soup is good stock. As Escoffier said, "Indeed, stock is everything in cooking...without it, nothing can be done." And the best stock is homemade. If you threw away the carcass from your Thanksgiving turkey, it was a serious mistake. Whether it be a turkey, chicken, or even a rabbit carcass, the secret is this:

Start with a good stainless steel stock pot that can hold at least three gallons or more. Break apart the carcass and put it into the pot. Cover the carcass all the way up and over the carcass by an inch. Put the lid on the stock pot and put it into your oven at 225 degrees for two days and two nights.

 The following day, remove from oven and let it cool to lukewarm. Strain it through a colander into another stock pot. The leftover meat off the carcass in the collander can be fed to dogs or cats. It won't be good for eating due to small bone particles that won't bother cats or dogs but you won't like. Now you can create "broth-cicles" to store the broth for later. Because if you rendered a turkey, you'll end up with a gallon of broth at least. Take heavy-duty gallon freezer bags and use a ladle to ladle about a quart of broth into a bag, close it, and set it carefully into the freezer so it remains upright. Do this until all the broth is bagged and in the freezer, unless you want to reserve some to make a soup with it right away.

When you want to use the broth, you take a freezer bag of broth out of the freezer, open the bag, and just peel the frozen broth "cicle" from inside and put it into a stock pot. Then it melts over low heat and it's ready to go. It usually won't stick to the inside of the bag due to the fat content. But if it does, just run it under hot water a few seconds and the broth-cicle will peel away easy.

This is the way to make great broth and it can be done with any carcass, be it turkey, chicken, game birds, goose, duck, rabbit, and so on. The quantity of broth depends on the size of the carcass. From a big turkey, you can garner at least two gallons of broth or more. Top quality stuff you can't get in the store and not salty like store-bought broth. It'll be more savory, too, with more fat in the broth which will make richer soups, stews, and chilis.

If you're a gravy fan, pour enough broth that'll be about the serving size of gravy you use for a meal into smaller heavy-duty freezer bags and make you a few of those. Then when you want gravy, you get the broth cicle out of the bag and melt it into your saucepan. Make your gravy with that using flour, milk, butter, salt, and black pepper. If you need the recipe for that, let me know. But I do it all by the palm-of-hand measurement, so, there's that. But this gravy is great on mashed potatoes, chicken, and rice. You can make several gravy-sized broth bags to keep in the freezer and gravy is only a few minutes away. Top quality gravy you can't buy in the store.

You can get a lot of mileage out of a turkey. Believe me, if you throw away carcasses without making broth, you're throwing money away.

JW_Halverson:
Dharma's words on stock are gospel.

stickbender:

     Ditto to Dharma, and J.W.!!  I could live on just soups alone.  And bean soups are my favorite.  I especially love Great Northern, and Butter beans, and Lima beans.  I make a killer Lima Bean soup!  I cook the Lima Beans, till just about done, Oh yeah, I usually use two packages of frozen Lima Beans.  If you have fresh from the garden ones Great!  Anyway, I cook them till they are almost done, and then cut up a sweet onion, and sometimes, if I can get them, a Leek, you know like "Julia Childs" said, on one of her cooking shows, quite some time back ...... "First you take a Leek" .....  Anyway, sometimes I will also add a Leek, and dice it up, and either put in a half to a pound of non cured bacon, or Hillshire Farms smoked beef sausage.  But I normally use the uncured bacon, because the sausage ingredients, reads like a Jr. Chemistry set.  But if you don't mind that, then use it.  Then I make a roux (Roo) of the bean broth, and flour, and onion, and garlic powder, and a dash or two of McCormicks original chicken, or just use Old Bay if you can't find the original chicken seasoning.  Then I put in a few liberal dashes of McCormicks, Smokehouse maple, seasoning.  Oh, when cooking the beans, I put a cup and a half, of water, and a cup and a half of Half, and Half cream. Salt and pepper, to taste. I do all this by taste. I also mash, or take some of the cooked Lima Beans out of the pot, and puree them, and put them back into the pot.  If you can get them, use the Ford Hook, type of Lima Bean, they are the big ones.  It has a much more rich flavor.  Anyway, baby ones, will work also.  I have had people who absolutely hated Lima Beans, ask for the recipe, after eating two or three helpings.  It is a very rich, and flavorful soup.  Not something for dieting, but as my Buddy's Wife calls it, it is Comfort food.  Try it, and you will like it.

                                    Wayne

Dharma:
Here is a great soup recipe from my father's ancestors:

SHCHI

1 pound of hamburger meat, browned in a skillet with a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce
2 quarts of beef broth
1 medium-sized turnip, diced fine
1 large potato, a one-pounder, diced fine
1 16oz. can of tomato sauce
1 32oz. jar of quality sauerkraut
2 tablespoons minced dried onions
2 tablespoons garlic powder or 3 large cloves of fresh garlic, minced
1 teaspoon dried dill
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon finely-ground black pepper

Into a large stock pot, start the beef broth simmering and add the diced turnip, potato, and browned meat. Keep covered. Once it's all boiling, add the onion, garlic, salt, and black pepper. Reduce heat and let this simmer covered for two hours. Then add the tomato sauce. Hint: Wash out the tomato sauce can with hot water, swirling it in the can, and add this to the soup to get extra mileage out of the tomato sauce clinging to the inside of the can. The tomato sauce/hot water will also add a rich liquid in the soup. It works, trust me, I've made this soup hundreds of times. Bring this back to a simmer, stirring well. Now stir in the dill. After that, dump the entire jar of sauerkraut, liquid and all, into the pot. Bring this to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer covered for 30 minutes. Taste soup, if you want more salt, add more to taste.

Serve this to the table in bowls piping hot. On the table should be sour cream or smetana that people can stir a dollop of into the soup, should they desire to do so. Also there should be on the side some slightly toasted slices of black bread, generously buttered. This soup is excellent for winter, especially snowy days. It only gets better every time you reheat it, but there's a trick to that. Don't microwave it in individual bowls. After the first meal, put the whole stock pot into the fridge. The next day, take it out and heat it up on the stove. Repeat this every time.

If you want more than the recipe calls for, double it. There's no wrong way to make shchi as far as quantities go. Like more broth? Add more broth to the recipe. More potato? Add another to the recipe. Each time you make it, you'll learn how to make shchi the way you like it. And if you make too much to eat in two or three meals, you can ladle it into a Tupperware container and freeze it. Then you can just run a little hot water over the Tupperware and dump the shchi-cicle into the stock pot like emptying an ice cube tray. Heat it on low, very slowly, until it melts. Then bring to a boil and you'll see it has been preserved nicely.

It's my favourite soup. Kept my ancestors fed for hundreds of years.

Dharma:
Oh, it was also traditional to serve kasha on the side sometimes. Kasha is an acquired taste for some. So, you be the judge.

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