Tip of the Month:If you are worried about the safety of any
prescription drugs you take, you can sign up at: https://www.consumermedsafety.org/medsafetyalert.aspand enter the
names of your medicines to get reports whenever problems arise. (N.b., I have
not done this myself and so cannot vouch for the 'safety' of giving your
information this way.)
Food Focus: Broth from
Bones!
If
you cook and eat meat, what do you do with the bones? No need to throw away all
that good nourishment! A very easy thing to do with them is to put them in a
pot of water and boil them over night.The next morning you have broth, in which you can use to cook rice or lentils.Or, you can reduce the broth over a medium
flame to make stock, that rich extract that will give future dishes an extra
depth of taste.The reducing, however, takes
time as the water is removed as steam, leaving the reduced stock, which will
keep indefinitely in the freezer.An ice
tray will give you easy access to individual cubes of it whenever you want.
Chicken
broth is said to be one of the nutritional wonders of the world, a digestible
source of all those bone minerals!If
you like chicken, you can easily make your own broth.When most of the meat has been eaten, take the
carcass and any drumsticks and put them in a pot, cover with water, and put the
lid on.For added gelatin, which is
soothing to the intestinal tract and reputedly helpful to arthritic joints, see
if you can buy chicken feet to add to the pot.A Whole Foods market near me stocks them frozen once a week -- but you
have to ask the butcher for them.You
can simmer the broth on the stove top or put it in an oven at about 225F for at
least ten or twelve hours, preferably twice that.It's long, but it's worth it.
The
only disagreeable part is getting the chicken fat off the top, once cool.You can use a de-fatting device, bought from
a culinary supplier, or you can refrigerate and then skim it off with a
spoon.After that, warm the broth so it
will pour easily and strain it.The
remaining bones, gristle, and skin are all soft enough for dogs or cats.Most of the nutrition, however, will be in
your broth.Reduce it to increase taste,
if you want, adding salt and pepper and parsely to taste.
For
an interesting discussion of why chicken, beef, fish, etc. broth is
exceptionally healthy, see Nourishing Traditions (Fallon &
Enig, New Trends Publishing, 2001) pages 116-118.The authors later quote from Hanna Kroeger's Ageless Remedies from Mother's Kitchen
on the subject of chicken broth, which "feeds, repairs, and calms the mucous
lining in the small intestine.This
inner lining is the beginning or ending of the nervous system." (Nourishing Traditions, p. 124)
