Cosmic Cooking

Easy Homemade Turkey or Chicken Stock

2012-02-07T11:58:00.000-08:00

Frozen turkey stock,
waiting to become soup on a cold day!

Next time you roast a whole chicken or turkey, make stock from the remains. It's incredibly easy, and you’ll create a goldmine of minerals to keep in the freezer and add to your diet at will. And it tastes amazing because your body-brain registers how nutritious it is and sends the message to your tastebuds. So comforting on a cold day!

According to Sally Fallon, author of Nourishing Traditions, the minerals in a bone-based stock are in the form of electrolytes, so they're more easily absorbed into the body than the kind you take in pills.

We've had so much trouble trying to balance calcium and magnesium in pill form, we've come to rely on beef, poultry, or even fish stock in our diet. You'll find Joseph using it as the basis for many of his best recipes, including a few coming up on this blog that are extra-special.

So get out a big pot and discover how easily you can enhance your own diet with more mineral nutrition!

Easy Instructions for Making Chicken or Turkey Stock

First, an optional step: Using alarge freezer bag, freeze the raw neck you pull from the cavity of your roasting chicken, turkey, goose, or game hen, saving the gizzard and liver separately for one of Joseph's sausage recipes or to eat now.

This is not optional: After you eat the roasted bird, be sure to add the leftover leg bones, carcass, and bits of flesh to that big freezer bag containing the raw neck. Your stock will taste evenbetter if you’ve also stuffed and/or seasoned the bird with herbs, and bastedit with red wine every half hour while cooking. Here's a great recipe.

For additional flavor, freezesome pan drippings in a little container, too, and add them while making thestock. Don’t worry about fat—you can skim it later if you insist.

Tomake the stock:

When you have a day at home, startin the morning by covering the frozen carcass and bones with fresh, filteredwater in a stock pot or large soup kettle.

*Tip: A real stock pot is a great thing to own because it's very lightweight stainless steel, so it's not too heavy when it's full and it's easy to wash, but it holds a lot of liquid. We found ours for under $20 at a discount department store. No reason to spend more! Here's one on Amazon.

Fill the pot with water, leavingabout 3-4 inchesof room at the top for additions. Add about 1/2 cup leftover red or white wine, or vinegar.This will help leech valuable minerals from the bones into your stock, creatinga wonderful source of calcium, magnesium, and potassium.

*Tip: We keep bottles of red and white wine for cooking in the refrigerator with a vacuum-sealed stopper. Works great! Some people think it still tastes good for drinking this way. We use the Metrokane Houdini Wine Preserverthanks to a hot tip from a brother-in-law.

Bring the pot to a rolling boil, andskim the foam that appears on the top. Do this for about 10 minutes, until thefoam subsides, then add seasonings. These can vary, but we generally add

a quartered onion

two or three carrots cut in large pieces

a celery stalk and some washed celeryleaves

parsley sprigs

fresh thyme

about ten whole peppercorns

anyfrozen pan drippings

Don’t add salt; you can add it when you use the stocklater. Bring to a boil again, then set the pot to simmer, covered, for 4-8hours, checking and stirring occasionally.

When the time is up, cool the stock pot, then pour through a metal strainer.Discard bones and debris. (Meat cooked in stock is usually flavorless, so we discard it.) Save the cooled stock in the refrigerator, but be sure tofreeze it if not used within 3 days. We use containers with small divisions, so we can pop out a cup or two at a time, melt it in a saucepan, and addit to recipes.

* * * *

That's it! NO MSG! Not oversalted! No unwanted chemicals! Pure nutrition, and a key ingredient for sauces, soups, casseroles, and so on. Try cooking your rice in it. Yum. I'm hooked! -- Lianne

Note from Joseph: You'll need at least two chicken carcasses for the stock to be sufficiently flavorful in a large stock pot. If you only have one, put less water. Even better would be to throw in a bunch of chicken necks, if you can find them, and some feet, too, to add some gelatin. At our local Asian superstore, they have whole chickens with the head and feet still on. Two of those in a stock pot boiling for 8 hours and you'll have an awesome healing brew. If the idea of boiling chicken heads and feet is just too revolting to you, try cackling like a witch and intoning Macbeth:

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble…
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing, etc.

If that doesn't work, corral a friend with a stronger stomach and talk them into it. They'll have fun making it and you'll have fun eating it. I promise!

**** Let us know in the comments how yours turned out! ****

Orange Roast Chicken with Red Wine

2012-02-01T22:02:00.000-08:00

Hi! This is Lianne. Joseph's been cooking up some fabulous soup recipes lately, even though winter seems to have forgotten to be cold in San Diego. But we're still getting frosty nights, so a nice warm bowl of homemade soup is especially welcome. But in this case, the chicken (or turkey) comes first!

Before we post the Creamy Cosmic Potato Leek Soup recipe, or the Creamiest Mushroom Soup Ever, I'm going to give you a little preliminary advice about making soup stock that you'll save in the freezer for making those recipes later. It's usually my job as kitchen assistant.

It's EASY to make soup stock
It's hugely beneficial, full of minerals like calcium, magnesium, and potassium in easy-to-absorb form
Anybody can make it
Once it's in your freezer, making soup is a breeze

You'll start by roasting a whole chicken or a turkey or other bird. You can roast it any way you like, but here's one my favorite ways to do it quickly. The flesh is delicately seasoned with oranges, and the wine basting makes it very tender.

Orange Roast Chicken with Red Wine

1 whole, organic, range-free roasting chicken
1 orange, cut in eighths to make wedges
1/2 small onion, cut in wedges
Parsley, washed fresh sprigs
Olive oil
Dry red wine
Salt
Pepper
Tools: Roasting pan; metal or glass baster preferred

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. (Or if yours is like ours and won't hold that temperature, 350 degrees.) The lower temperatures is preferred.

Rinse the chicken inside and out, saving the liver and gizzard for one of Joseph's sausage recipes. Place the neck in a large, quart-sized freezer bag because you'll be adding the carcass and leg bones to the bag after you eat the chicken. (Remember: Scrupulously wash up with soap after all chicken handling: counters, sinks, hands, utensils.)

Sprinkle salt and pepper inside the main cavity. (It helps if someone holds it open for you.) Push in a parsley sprig, then press orange wedges in so the juicy part will be near the meat, alternating with onion wedges and parsley sprigs. Keep it loose or the chicken will take longer to cook.

Rub the outside with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and place the bird in a small roasting pan. (Too large and you'll lose the valuable pan juices to evaporation; too small and it will spill fat into the bottom of the oven.) Add about 1/4 inch of water to the bottom of the pan, no more. Place chicken in the oven and set a timer for 10 minutes so the salt and pepper can "set" before the first basting.

When the timer goes off, pour about a quarter to half cup of red wine over the bird. Close the oven and set the timer again for 35-40 minutes. Next time you baste, first use a baster to scoop up the juices and pour over the chicken. (If they've evaporated, add a little more water to the pan until the natural juices start to accumulate. But don't overdo it or you'll water down the valuable pan juices.) Before you close up the oven and set the timer for another 35-50 minutes, pour another dose of red wine over the bird.

Baste the chicken with pan juices and red wine like this, every half hour or so, until a meat thermometer stuck in the breast (but not against a bone) reads 190 degrees. This may take up to two hours or more with today's fat chickens and the stuffing you've added.

When done, remove the bird, which should be nicely browned, and let it sit a few minutes before carving. Discard the onions and oranges. Enjoy!

Preparation for the Soup Stock:

After dinner, save the leg bones and wings from plates and add them to the freezer bag with the neck. (Don't be squeamish! They'll be boiled for a looonggg time. Unless you have extenuating reasons to discard them.) When you've eaten all the chicken, add the carcass to the other bones in the freezer. It will be waiting for the day you're ready to make the stock.

Tip: Instead of making gravy from the pan drippings, try freezing the drippings and fat in a small plastic container. This delicious liquid will add wonderful flavor to your stock or other recipes later!

Next post: How to Make Super-Nutritious Chicken or Turkey Stock

What is Cosmic Cooking?

2012-01-29T18:16:00.000-08:00

“I love traditional foods because I think many of them carrythe wisdom of the ancestors. It’s the wisdom of the body before corporationsgot involved with their hidden agendas, and murked up the body’s innatenutritional instincts.”– Joseph

“I’m the fortunate wife who gets to eat all of thesemarvelous concoctions Joseph creates. I also wash a lot of dishes.” – Lianne

What is Cosmic Cooking?

Cosmic Cooking is healthy, inspired, and often spontaneous. We think the lost art of cooking your own food is an important "Survival Skill for the 21st Century."

Cosmic Cooking is best enjoyed sitting down at a table with loved ones. But if you must, it willstill be nurturing and satisfying stuffed in a backpack, eaten alone, consumedin the car, or spoon-fed in front of the TV. Although we think you’re going to like it somuch, you’ll prefer the table, where you can taste every delicious morsel!

Thenot-so-secret ingredient of Cosmic Cooking is LOVE, every step of the way, from the field to the fork.

How This Blog Can Help You

If you don't know how to cook, let us inspire and instruct you.

If you do, enjoy some crazy new combinations or ideas or ingredients or tools you've never tried before.

And by all means, post your experiences in the Comments section! We'd love to hear from you.

What Sorts of Things We Eat

We love to eat a gourmet, widely varied diet. You'll find specific posts about ingredients here, but you're probably wondering what kind of recipes you'll find, and what "food restrictions" we might follow. Oh, we've tried them all! But now we're in a phase of healing our metabolism, which was severely damaged by our experiences with elimination diets in the past.

Now we eat a modified-traditional, balanced diet, more like that of our grandparents than our parents, but with a few tweaks. We do closely monitor what we put in our bodies, so that our diet tends to look like this most of the time:

* Lower sodium
* Fewer, carefully measured carbohydrates
* Healthy fats, including butter, ghee, and lard
* No sugar or its artificial derivatives
* Natural sweeteners (fruit, stevia, occasional honey or maple syrup)
* Organic or conscientiously farmed produce
* Seasonal foods
* Traditional dishes modified for today
* Limited wheat and wheat flour
* Variety of other grains and flours, properly soaked and prepared
* Fermented foods for digestive enhancement
* Limited lactose (for Lianne), with more goat milk and cheeses
* Animal foods, from oysters to emu and everything in between
* Fresh fruits and vegetables, straight from the farm if possible!

Joseph considers it a special challenge to redesign familiar favorites to suit these parameters. He'll be posting specifics about some of his unusual ingredients, with recipes for sampling.

We're not vegetarians, but we've been hugely influenced by the recipes and cooking style in Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone; by the Weston A. Price Foundation and Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions; and our large collection of traditional cookbooks, which you'll surely hear more about!

Who We Are

Joseph Downey is a self-taught gourmet who loves to create spontaneous, unexpected delights from whole, lovingly grown and carefully nurtured ingredients. He’s also an author, poet, composer, and dancer. But his favorite way to relax from his full-time day job is in the kitchen, converting another recipe into something truly magnificent—or just plain weird but yummy.

Lianne Downey has become an adventurous eater, purely for survival in Joseph’s kitchen! But she has no regrets and does in fact eat amazing meals three times a day, especially on weekends. She’s also an author, dancer, musician, and publisher. She writes another blog, "Soul Pursuits," about our shared adventures in interdimensional consciousness.

Together, we own Cosmic Visionary Music & Books – and this blog.