I tend to do things in spurts.

Get your mind out of the gutter, people.

For instance, I’ll go out to eat every night in a row for three weeks, and then I’ll decide to go grocery shopping, whereupon I’ll cook for a few weeks. It goes in cycles. I also tend to do this with other things as well, however, since this entry deals with cooking, another example dealing with auto maintenance, wouldn’t do you any good.

So I went food shopping this week, and I’ve decided to make stock. Now, I’m a pretty good cook (when I want to be). I have decent knife technique (from buying $5 worth of veggies a few years ago and practicing chopping, filleting, dicing, etc.), and I can consistently prepare food that tastes the same each time I make it.

I’m even getting better at timing how long it takes to do one particular task, and scheduling the pots and pans so that the entire meal is ready at once. It’s a neat trick, I know.

Anyway, I decided to make stock.

It seemed like a chef-ly thing to do. Everything tastes better fresh: herbs, soups, a third thing that my mind has difficulty conjuring up this morning. Everything!

Especially since every canned beef or chicken stock tastes like someone squeezed it through a dirty dishrag before canning. It all tastes blah. Blah, and salty.

So I chopped up my onions, and let them sauté in a stockpot. While my onions where on their way to becoming translucent, my beef bones were roasting in the over, and I chopped carrots and celery.

Once all of my veggies were finished sautéing, I deglazed with some white wine. Now all of you home chefs are thinking, “A stock with beef bones and white wine?! What the Hell?”

Trust me. Once, I was making stock and ran out of red wine, so I used some white. It doesn’t get dark, like it would with the red wine, but it tastes incredible.

So in goes my white wine to deglaze. Then I added my veal meat, and beef bones, and let that render for a while before throwing in my water. Also, I toss in some whole peppercorns and a few bay leaves for the Hell of it.

The smells wafting off of the pot at this point are simply Heavenly. Veal enhances any stock. Just experiment.

Anyway, I forgot to add, that if you are living in my apartment, and intend to boil water, you’d better disable the damn smoke detector. It is the most sensitive, annoying piece of garbage I have ever seen. Steam sets this fucker off. So I disabled it so as not to piss off my neighbors. I’m so thoughtful sometimes I could puke.

So this stock simmers for a good two to three hours or so, and then I season it with salt, pepper, whatever. I strain it and let it sit overnight in the fridge.

At this point, all the fat rises to the top and congeals, so it looks absolutely disgusting the next morning. Although it tastes, and smells incredible. Anyway, then I skim off the top layer of fat and separate the stock. I freeze half of it, and turn the rest into demi glace.

Commence drooling.

Last night, I made chicken and mashed potatoes, a simple, quick dinner, and used a sauce made from adding some of the demi glace to a roux (butter and flour).

The sauce alone was worth the effort and it tasted remarkably similar to a dish I once had in a two-star restaurant and paid about $17.

So like I said, I’m on a cooking kick.

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