Homemade Vegitable Stock

Vegetable Refuse (top left), Vegetable Stock (bottom left), Chicken Marsala (right)

You can see that I took this picture myself (without help from the wonderful Servia who has a much better eye and camera than I do).

This post could also be entitled Graduate School Soup or How Not To Waste Your Vegetables.

Not wasting food is something that is generally important to me. But I'm just one person and there are a lot of things that I have to buy in greater bulk than I can eat it (especially because, one of the nice things about graduate school, is that most events have lots of food). So, how does one solve this problem? I find that vegetables are especially tricky because they go bad so fast.

I found my inspiration for making this vegetable broth from Oh My Veggie and Poor Girl Eats Well.

Freezer Bag Vegetable Stock

• In the weeks before you make the soup, keep a large plastic ziplock in your freezer. When you have vegetable scraps put them in there.  
• Please note: you want your vegetables scraps to be edible (i.e. not rotting and washed), and to not include things in the cabbage family which will make your broth very bitter.  You can put in things like herbs, but they will change the flavor of your broth, so keep that in mind. I suggest things like green onion ends, carrots that have dried out, etc.
• You want to make your stock when  you have about 12 cups of vegetables in the freezer.
• On the day you make your soup, put two tablespoons of olive oil into a broth pot and heat on medium heat.
• Chop about half a sweet onion, and sautee it in the bottom of the broth pot.
• When the onion is aromatic and soft, add the 12 cups of vegetables and 12 cups of water.
• I then simmered the broth for about 3 hours until it became medium brown and stock-like.
• If you want to make broth, you can season your stock now with salt, pepper, and whatever other herbs you like. However, you don't need to season it if you want stock.
• When the stock is done, strain it into a bowl. 
• Ta da! You have your very own stock.

I made a wonderful mushroom risotto with my stock. According to Egnatius, it was the best risotto I've ever made (although part of that may have been that we were gifted some wonderful shitake mushrooms). We ate it so fast that I didn't even take a picture.

Random and Fascinating Things on the Internet

As I'm sure everyone knows by now, I am a devotee of audio books, and especially of Audible. As I was browsing through Audible today looking for my monthly book (I picked Peter Brown's Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD because I'm studying for my Roman History comprehensive and one of the writers is a Late Antique scholar). However, while I was there, I found some other interesting things.

I don't know if I've mentioned Charleton Griffen before; he is one of the narrators that reads a lot of the classics including the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as Livy, Tacitus, and many others. While his readings are conveniently unabridged and great for studying for my history of literature exam, unfortunately I am not the biggest fan of his voice. He read slowly and has an accent I'm not keen on. However, I noticed when I was there that Charleton Griffen also did the reading of the 9-11 Commission. Interestingly, when I looked at that, I realized that not the commission itself, but the audio recordings of the transcripts of the interviews are actually free for all Audible members, which I think is pretty cool.

On a totally separate side note, I have recently become addicted to the History of Philosophy without Any Gaps.

Notes from My First Year as a PhD

The year isn't over yet, but I'm closing in on the finish line. It's been a long but I have really enjoyed (at least parts of) it. I've learned more than I thought possible. Most of it is academic, but I thought that I would share the nonacademic bits.

My first installment will be on recipes-- I've learned a lot about how  to preserve veggies before they go bad.  It should be debuting when I get back from this conference.