Cooking Marathon

Put mildly, yesterday was a cooking marathon for me. I generally think our cookware collection is excessive--we have more Staub and Le Creuset Dutch/French ovens than most people would need, and likewise, merging two households meant multiple stockpots. Now, I was thinking, gosh, we should really part with some of these. Yesterday convinced me that maybe it's not time for that.

This grew out of a combination of a half bushel of tomatoes, two chicken carcasses, and a lovely beef brisket. So, the planned main meal was a beef brisket carbonnade--essentially, a piece of beef braised in beer with a bunch of onions. This worked nicely--the sweet onions combined with a bit of balsamic, some mustard, the beer, and the beef to make a wonderful stew. Cooked in a dutch oven, in the oven, just large enough for the brisket, it was served with egg noodles cooked in a stock/pasta pot stove top.

Then there was the stock. I make my own stock--in this case, from the carcasses of two chickens--one broken down and made into a white stew, the other roasted, each over the last couple weeks. The bones, plus veggies, cook on low for hours on a back burner with filtered water, all in a big stock pot. Simple, tasty, great base for soups, stews, etc.

Finally, the "big picture"--the tomatoes from farmers market. We've just had a hard freeze, so this is pretty much it for getting a big batch of cooking tomatoes. Earlier in the year, I'd made batches of tomato sauce, and some tomato soup. But this was a really big batch. so, naturally, I made not one, but two, soups. The first was a spicy soup combining roasted jalapenos, poblanos, roasted tomatoes, and roasted garlic. Roasting makes peeling tomoatoes relatively easy. Onions, of course, served as a base for the soup, along with stock and some white wine. The result is a spicy soup that is enhanced by a dollop of sour cream, and perhaps a squeeze of lime. This is a truly fun soup to make.

My second tomato soup first involved peeling tomatoes after a dunk in boiling water. The soup then was built on a base of bacon and red onions. Sweet red peppers were used, along with thyme. The tomatoes cooked in stock and wine, and were again pureed. In the end, cream and milk brought added complexity. In all, very yummy! And a rather sweeter version than the first soup.

So, this all led to a big chest freezer full of soups and stock, set aside for the winter. A long tough day in the kitchen. But worthwhile and fun.