winter – Cook Instead

Bone Broth is a SCAM

The difference between sad, salt-filled flavor-cubes, or, worse, a can of glop, and real, soul-warming, heart-filling soup is 3 hours of your time and a chicken carcass you already have. You do not have to pay $8 at the Whole Foods for the privilege. And you’re already going to spend those hours of your life puttering around doing something, so why not spend it on stock and buy yourself something really nice? Like, as I mentioned, soup?

The roast chicken is one of nature’s perfect units of people food. I realize this makes me sound nuts, but come with me for a sec. There are some foods, like an apple or an egg, that are literal perfect units of human consumption. You hold it in your little hand, and it has its little wrapper, and the insides are all delicious and just the right size for a snack.

A roast chicken is like that, but for 2-4 people: first roasted, then shredded in crepes or a pot pie, and then, miraculously, as STOCK in soups, stews, risottos, pilafs, pastas, etc. Only when you take out a 2-cup block of frozen chicken stock to make yourself a truly transcendent rice pilaf will you know true power. It’s intoxicating. (Not literally).

Plus, I find the more of the chicken I use the better I feel, not just because it’s extremely delicious, but because you’re making the very most of that little chicken who gave her life for your quesadillas. Whatever, it makes me kind of emotional. Thanks, little chicken. I will do right by you.

ANYWAY, this is not the Get Sad About Farm Animals Variety Hour. The point is, despite what many online recipes tell you, you don’t have to buy sixty chicken wings, or use 3 whole uncooked chickens (looking at you Ina), or get 4 chicken’s worth of bones from the butcher. You don’t have to put whipped egg whites on top of it to make it extra-clear like that guy on TikTok, or strain it through a lace wedding veil. You just have to throw some stuff you already have in a pot and let it burble away happily on the stove while you go about your life like the busy and productive cottage witch you are.

Golden Latkes

Fried potato is one of the most delicious things you can eat, but I understand not wanting to make potato pancakes from scratch. When hours of work can turn so easily into nothing but grey-brown lumps of sadness and broken dreams, I fully understand the urge to rip off all your clothes and take to the hills, screaming, to live out the rest of your days as a hermit. Or at least, to run out to the store, pick up a pack of frozen hash-browns and call it a day.

And frozen hash-browns are delicious. They were a staple of my college dining hall brunch buffet, and they’re the one frozen potato product sold in the UK that doesn’t suck. (Why is this? This is a largely potato-based culture, you’d think they’d have it figured out by now.) But they are not the same as latkes. Hash-browns are for hangovers, and latkes are for joy.

Latkes are for special occasions. Latkes are for celebrating how great life is and how lucky we are to be living it. Your first thought on eating a latke should be “I can’t believe this is happening to me. I can’t believe I actually get to eat this. I need 5 more of these, immediately.”

Bomb-Ass Hot Chocolate

There’s a phenomenon in British weather that I like to call “the swirly”, where a storm will come in over the Atlantic, hang out for a few days, shimmy over to France, bounce off of Norway, and come back for round two a couple days later.

I now get why small talk about the weather is a thing here. In Chicago, as unpleasant as it might get, at least you can look at Colorado and brace yourself for tomorrow. And it’s not gonna then rebound off of Pittsburgh and come back as its own sequel.

This week’s dunk in the metaphorical weather toilet MIGHT just bring us snow tomorrow, but today it’s just this:

That’s why my work-from-home setup looks like this:

This is the best hot chocolate I know how to make. Believe me when I tell you you don’t need a trendy hot chocolate bomb or a flashy pre-made mix.

This is better.

Winter is Coming, but Soup is already here

The Columbia University campus exists in what I like to call a “lunchbreak wasteland.” Luckily, in the basement of the arts and architecture library there is a small and shitty cafeteria called Brownies and on Monday they serve a sausage and kale soup.

Is this the world’s greatest soup? No. But while Wednesday’s tomato bisque and Friday’s broccoli cheddar undoubtedly get glorped out of massive industrial soup-pouches delivered by the good folks at Sodexho, I believe this one is a Brownies Original. What corporation would mass-produce an aggressively spicy soup with lentils, sweet potatoes, kale, and enough Italian sausage to make getting through your afternoon classes a real gastrointestinal challenge? Who decided these ingredients worked together? It had to be a personal choice, and that’s what made it my favorite.

I haven’t lived in New York for two years, but this Monday I suddenly had to have this deeply visually unprepossessing but comfortingly hearty soup. All I had were some Sainsbury’s own-brand sausages, some elderly potatoes, and a dream.