Stock: Broke People Magic

Stock. It's the difference between disgustingly watery soup that everyone will laugh at and hate and delicious miraculous stuff that will probably cure everything short of a gunshot to the face. Sure, you can buy stuff in a can or a box at the grocery, but that's mass produced and devoid of personal touches like taste and interest and healthy shit. Also, secret pro tip our grandparents and great-grandparents knew: stock is how you turn food trash into medicine.

Do what now?
Chicken soup is a cliche thing to eat when you're sick for a reason. Protein and nutrients in easily absorbed, non-throat-killing form? Yes please. But here's the thing: you can pack a lot of nutrients into water and chicken fat. The stuff that's actually good for you in food is either water or fat soluable, and if you have both water and fat soaking food scraps and pulling out the good stuff you're bound to create a nuclear bomb of healthy goodness.

"But I don't want to buy extra vegetables to make stock!" Calm your silly ass down. You know the parts of veggies you toss out? Onion ass, celery ends, carrot shavings, collard leaf spines, all that? You could be eating that, but we as a species decided that was kind of nasty. Ah, but, hey, you can leech all the good stuff out of that and make those nourishing ass chemicals yours. It's broke ass magic. Food trash becomes the stuff that gets your dumb ass healthy when you've screwed up. Just keep a bag handy when you're cooking other stuff, especially if you're cooking for a lot of people for a holiday or something, and toss in all your odds and ends. You'll be able to make enough stock after Thanksgiving alone to last you into January, and if you cook for Christmas, too, you'll have even more.

Alright, how do I perform such wizardry?
The basics of making stock is saving stuff that can be made into stock and then boiling that shit for hours to pull out the good stuff. That's literally it. Alton Brown says fourteen hours with a protein rest and skimming the top, but if you don't want to complicate things just make use of a strainer and a funnel. Throw all your stuff in a pot, cover it with water, and boil it for hours. At least overnight. Add more water to keep things covered up, and then strain out the liquid goodness. That's all there is to it. You could even get fancy and compost the solids, if you wanted to.

For storage, you're going to want some mason jars. Clean them up, pour your liquid in still boiling so it's good and sanitary, and seal it up. If stuff settles at the bottom or floats to the top, no worries. The sediment is just boiled bits of solids that were in solution, so bits of marrow or vegetable, and it's all boiled and sanitary. If it bugs you, strain it out. The floating stuff is fat and protein coagulating out. Skim it off the top if it bugs you.

That's literally it, though. You're seriously just boiling food trash to wrench every last bit of food out of it, which has the added bonus of concentrating all the good stuff into a compact and healthy form.

Bones.
All sorts. That carcass of a roasted chicken? Crack the bones to get to the marrow, boil that bitch. The picked over remains of your Clansgiving turkey? Crack and boil, son. Ham bone you froze a year ago and forgot about when you made red beans last? Bet your ass it's still good for stock. Hell, you brought three boxes of Popeye's to the parade and now you have a box full of bones in your back seat? Use it. Buddy went hunting and let you grab the bones leftover once he's got his cuts of meat? Crack. That. Shit. Open.

See, bones have cartilage, which boils down into ready to use stuff your body needs. They've also got calcium, which is what your bones are made of, too, and marrow is chock full of awesome stuff. You paid ten dollars a bowl for boiled down food trash when they called it pho. All pho is is boiled down bone broth. You literally could have bought a three dollar Walmart chicken, eaten dinner off it, used the rest of the meat to make chicken salad, and then boiled the bones down and gotten free pho. Think about that shit for a minute.

Vegetable trash.
Carrot greens? Ass ends of celery? Potato peels? Cucumber leavings? The bits of an onion you cut off? Broccoli stems? All of that shit is good. Dodgy looking bell pepper that you don't remember buying and isn't bad yet but isn't great, either? Yeah, boil that shit. Someone brought a veggie tray to a party and you know you aren't going to eat baby carrots and cherry tomatoes for the next however many days? Boom, in the pot. That garlic bulb you're pretty sure is starting to sprout because you just didn't remember to use it before you bought more garlic? Don't let it die in vain. That box of salad you bought before you remembered you were the only one eating salad and now the greens are going limp? Save it. Your roommate thought they'd maybe try a diet and it failed and your fridge is clogged with aspirational vegetables? Yeah, make that mistake into some fire ass soup. Hell, you can toss in orange peels and such, too, if you want, and pretty much anything else you want. That's the thing. You're just reclaiming food that's otherwise going to waste. Or, hell, buy veggies new if you want. However you want to do it.

Soup
Make some soup, dude! Soup is good for you, delicious, and amazing. Forget that Campbell's bullshit. You just boiled down a bunch of food trash into a magic elixir that will make any soup recipe ten times better. The crappy stock you get at the store is bland, homogenized trash. Yours has all kinds of character and flavor they didn't even think to try, because they have to have batch consistency. They will never know the joy that that dodgy looking bell pepper and the remains of a veggie party tray can bring to a used box of fried chicken bones.

Eternal Soup
Or, hey, go straight up medieval and just keep adding more stuff and liquid and keep it on the backburner until it'll float a lead weight on the surface. Eternal soup, it's called. My maw maw did that shit for years, and it kept all her kids healthy. Keep a big ass lidded stock pot on the back of the stove on a low heat. You throw in food trash over and over again and strain it out every few days, keeping the liquid just chilling back there until you need it. Especially if you cook real food every day, you're eventually going to have a pot full of more food value than whatever meal you actually wanted to cook that night, and if you kept on tossing in bones it'll be super rich. So what if it's been back there for weeks? Heat kills germs, and by the time you eat it it'll be so nutrient dense it'll be super food. Literally. You might gain powers. It probably cures cancer. Probably. The only caveat I can think of with eternal soup, besides never emptying it all the way, is to never skim the fat off. When you're not simmering, the fat forms a protective skin over the top that stops bacterial interlopers from getting at your delicious nutrient dense treasure.

Master Stock
You know the Chinese do this thing that's like eternal soup, called a master stock. They make a pretty basic stock and use it to braise meats, from chicken to duck and pork to quail, and they strain and save that liquid and reuse it for other braisings. You know how this works. The meat absorbs the flavors in the stock and gives its flavor into the stock, making it richer and richer. There's chefs in China who've kept a master stock going in the family for centuries. Think about that shit. A hundred years of ducks, chickens, pigs, cows, shrimp, vegetables, and whatever else ended up getting braised, all adding flavor into a glorious golden liquid. Fuck a bunch of muscle milk. That's more protein in liquid form--and tastier--than even bears thinking about.

Instant Flavor Pack
You want to get really tricky? Take your stock and boil it down until it just won't boil down anymore. If you used bones and meat as well as veggies, it'll be a thick, gelatinous liquid that smells awesome. You can pour that shit into an ice cube tray, freeze it, and toss a cube into pretty much any pot you've got going from pasta to soup to whatever, and BOOM. Instant stock flavor. People will think you slaved over a hot stove for days getting this big complex hearty flavor, and all you did was toss a stock cube in a pot. Genius. Like you're a wizard or some shit. Because you are.