I think I've already mentioned Julia Moskin's D.I.Y Cooking Handbook for the New York Times online right? It's where I got inspired to make vin d'orange. (Which turned out great, incidentally.) She's got a bunch of useful recipes there, including a few that overlap with some of mine. Like one for making your own ketchup; and preserving lemons; and this one for making your own fresh cream cheese. Hers is a slightly shorter process because she uses rennet, which causes your milk to curdle right away. I learned my technique from Nourishing Traditions, where you simply let milk sit out on the counter for a few days until it curdles on its own. Actually, some good bacteria helps it along. You separate the curds from the whey (reserving the latter for making pickles and sauerkraut, and stirring into soups and smoothies), then drain the curds so they come together in a light, creamy cheese. It's kind of magical.
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As in bleached, refined, high-heat-processed, denatured, extruded and packaged breakfast cereals. You know the cutesy O's and puffs and crisps we all grow up eating? Poison. In reading Nourishing Traditions, Sally Fallon's excellent, information-packed guide to eating and cooking for maximum health and nutrition (and enjoyment!), I learned something that I had sort of intuited already but that still seemed shocking when I really understood the facts: the extreme processing to which much packaged food is subjected not only robs what we eat of essential nutrients but can actually be toxic to us. It's particularly true for grains and nuts, which contain fragile oils that turn rancid, and thus harmful, when subjected to heat. That's what makes breakfast cereals so bad for you. The grains are totally broken down and then extruded at extremely high temperatures; ever notice how little they resemble any actual food? Even those "healthy" boxed cereals should be ruled out, including granola and rolled oats. For the most part, convenience foods are not at all convenient for our bodies. As easy as it is to dump some Cheerios and homogenized milk into a bowl, it takes just 15 minutes more to cook up a breakfast that actually has some nutritional value.
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Once you make chicken stock using this recipe, I promise you'll never want to go back to that stuff in the box, no matter how organic it is or how convenient it seems. You can make an enormous vat of this and freeze small containers or even ice cube trays full of it to use for months. If space is at a premium in your freezer, you can boil the stock down to a concentrated and syrupy demi-glace which can later be reconstituted into stock by adding water. I got this recipe from Nourishing Traditions and it's really quite similar to most chicken stock recipes you'll find, with one key exception: you cook it over very low heat for at least 6 and as many as 24 hours! Turns out this make a huge difference in the flavor, color and consistency of the stock. It's rich, golden, unctuous without being greasy and highly flavored. Of course it helps if you are using a whole chicken, or lots of good bony parts, including necks and feet.
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I love all the trappings of an American summer barbecue—pickles, ketchup, chips, mayonnaise. But now that I've become so conscious of what goes into the industrialized versions of these classics, I will never set out a bottle of Heinz again. It's loaded with high fructose corn syrup and corn syrup, salt and "natural flavoring," which could easily mean MSG. So sad, considering the origins of this wonderful tomato condiment. The word "ketchup" (also "catsup") derives from the Chinese ke-tsiap for pickled-fish sauce, a widespread condiment since ancient times. (See here for my reference to its Roman origins.) The English added mushrooms, nuts and even oysters to it; the Americans added tomatoes from Mexico. So ketchup was originally a lacto-fermented sauce, full of nutrition, enzymes and good bacteria, and not the sugar-laden, heat-processed junk we consume to the tune of half a billion bottles annually. Guess where I'm going with all this? Straight to making our own ketchup. It's easy, really good and keeps in the fridge just like your Heinz. But plopping it on your kids' burgers won't send their blood sugar through the roof or rot their teeth. You can also modify this ketchup to suit your own tastes: add a little curry, or a couple of minced jalapeños, or some toasted, ground fennel seeds. The basic recipe tastes pretty close to the bottled stuff, though it's a little funkier, more complex in a palate-pleasing, umami way.
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