Into the Broth

I’ve been following this project, A Summer from Scratch, since it started in June. Every post makes me wish I was eating dinner at her house. I love fresh, and wholesome, foods. It’s just that running a kitchen is work and sometimes I live up to my menu plan and sometimes I don’t. My intentions are never quite as ambitious as that project, but I still take inspiration for my semi-from-scratch kitchen.

One of the more demoralizing problems with semi-from-scratch is that a change of plans (like being laid up with a broken tailbone) can lead to a change of menu. Last week we ate a lot of foods that could go straight from freezer to microwave to table. I’m ashamed to report that my crisper drawer seemed one atomic event away from spawning a comic book villain. Well, on the surface anyway.

It wasn’t really that bad. A few things had to go straight to the compost heap, but most of the abandoned veggies were perfect for making broth. Veggie broth has become a morale-saving staple in my kitchen. Instead of throwing out slightly limp celery or the flat leaf parsley that is always sold in bunches larger than I need I make a Monday night broth. I try to make soup every Tuesday so I can get to my crisper drawer rejects before it’s too late.

Last night I started with limp celery, extraneous parsnips, senior carrots, questionable shitake mushrooms and a perfectly healthy onion sauteed in olive oil. Then I chopped in a slightly overdue tomato and the excess scallions, parsley, sage leaf and thyme I’d culled from the crisper. Normally, I’d just pour in some water, but I had half a box of leftover store-bought broth in the fridge so I tossed that in, instead. Thus, the semi-from-scratch nature of my kitchen. With the boxed broth I didn’t need to add salt, but I sprinkled in pepper and a couple of bay leaves for flavor. I cooked it all to mush and then strained it out with my colander for today’s soup.

This week it was a Veggie Caponata Soup, mostly from a cookbook. I sauteed up red onion, celery and minced garlic, added canned tomato paste, coarsely chopped eggplant, zucchini and roma tomatoes, sliced baby bella mushrooms, last night’s broth, canned tomato juice, bottled lemon juice, capers and chopped green olives from jars. I simmered that judiciously and about twelve hours after I started the purging of my crisper drawer I had a delicious, semi-from-scratch soup, garnished with toasted french bread, arugula and sliced ribbons of fresh basil.

It all builds on itself. If I weren’t trying to cook more from scratch, I wouldn’t have such a variety of things in my crisper, and if I didn’t have such a threat of produce spoiling unused, then I wouldn’t be making so much broth. What started as nothing more than a solution to a problem has become a culinary highlight to my week. My sinuses and tailbone may hate me right now, but my belly is pure contentment.

Tagged as: food, health, housewife