With my wife not feeling well, back on Friday I went out and got a rotisserie chicken - ripped all the meat off and set it aside, and made broth out of the bones (and the usual carrots, onion, celery, and herbs). I am not above using mass-produced broth when I am cooking, but when the goal is to get nutrition and hydration into someone, home made is a ton better. I used some of my broth to make the congee last night.
Back many years ago, as a wedding present someone got us a physical, bound collection of Cook's Illustrated back issues, like a decade's worth. I had not really looked at the magazine before, in large part because the person who gave it to us... was a real snob. So I had assumed that, if he liked the magazine, it was targeting food snobs - the high end French and Italian restaurant kind of people. But, since we had a decade of the things, we started reading...
I was incredibly wrong. Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country are solid staples for anyone who likes to cook. The key, of course, is in the name of the organization. America's TEST Kitchen. A great many cookbooks and magazines don't actually test out the recipes - they just assume the writer knows what they are doing. ATK tests up, down, sideways, and with variations to find the best, and usually most practical, way to get cooking done.
I use both store bought and homemade stocks. Ain‘t no shame in my game!
The stock that changed my kitchen was turkey/poultry stock. Because we’re usually the hosts for the big holidays, I usually had 1-4 bird carcasses* to work with. I’d put them in my 20qt stock pot, covered with water, and bring to a simmer while I’m cleaning up. Between the cooking of the stock, reducing it, and cooling, though, that added several hours to the end of my long day in the kitchen.
Then, in a fit of
Gear
Acquisition
Syndrome (GAS), I bought a 30qt stock pot, and it revolutionized my holidays. As is probably evident to you as a physicist, water takes a lot of energy- and time- to heat. When I was making stock in the 20qt pot with all those carcasses, I needed a lot of water to cover them, because they went all the way to the top. But in the 30qt pot, they don’t even go halfway up, so I need less water to properly cover the bones. Less water = less heat = less time. That one change shaved HOURS off my holiday stock making.
As for ATK and the rest, I started off watching a couple of episodes on PBS, and my Mom coincidentally got a subscription to CI for my Dad’s medical practice waiting room. I was hooked: I asked for- and got- the website subscription for a Christmas gift.
So far, one of the best recipes I’ve gotten from them was their duck-fat oven roasted potatoes. I had been trying for YEARS to perfect a roasted potato recip, and theirs showed me where my efforts were going wrong. I even made a discovery of my own: while the recipe called for duck fat, they also point out bacon fat worked almost as well. Great for me, because I can’t find duck fat, but bacon fat is easy to come by. But I have tried other fats besides.
I often have rendered
beef fat from cooking ground meat for my dogs (longish story) and I tried THAT one day. It, too, worked quite well.
Vegetable oils. OTOH, just...didn’t. I have no idea why, but the potatoes never came out anywhere near as good as when I used animal fats. I mean, they were still decent enough to serve, so you COULD do a vegetarian/vegan version of the recipe, but it just wouldn’t be the same.
I also used the fats left over from cooking the potatoes to do a quick oven roast- or pan fry- of San Marzano tomatoes, and it was so good that my tomato-hating cousin was asking me what I did to the tomatoes while he was popping them in his mouth like grapes.
* the big one is always from my steamed turkey but we also usually have a fried one as well. And occasionally we get chicken, duck or goose to work with from the other attendees.