Quick winter soup

I've recently become a big fan of broth. Well, okay, so I've been a fan of broth for a long time, but now I want to eat it every day, pretty much just straight up. Bone broth is so warming, sustaining, and delicious in these cold, snowy months -- there is really nothing like it! And of course, in addition to being tasty and comforting, it's also an excellent source of gelatin which serves to attract digestive juices to the food in our stomachs, which makes it the perfect thing to serve before a winter meal. (Winter meals generally contain mainly cooked foods which repel digestive juices, but including gelatin in the form of broth remedies this problem.)

These days I am still making stock about once a week, and for a while now I've been alternating between chicken, beef, shrimp, and fish, generally keeping a Mason jar or two in the fridge all the time for a quick meal. I like to chop onions, garlic, scallions, shallots, or leeks and throw them in the pot while I heat the broth. Ginger is also a good addition, though you have to use it sparingly. In January I made my first oxtail soup (pho style) and it has quickly become my favorite thing, served with extra fish sauce, chili sauce, and hoisin sauce (though I leave these out when serving to Oliver).

So that's my tip: make stock weekly, freeze most of it but keep some always thawed in your fridge, pour a few cups in your smallest pot, add some freshly-chopped aromatics (or shrimp butter if making a fish or shrimp broth), and boil briefly. Technically this could hardly be called soup, I suppose...but still, it's a great meal starter, and if you wanted something heartier you could add some beans, brown rice, greens, or winter vegetables as well -- even frozen meatballs or sliced sausage.

We will be covering most of the dishes I've mentioned in my upcoming cooking series.

Just for the heck of it, here's a picture of Oliver post-oatmeal yesterday morning (note the great lighting of our brand new kitchen! we moved last Sunday).

Winter weekend locavore breakfast

A typical weekend breakfast for our family involves pastured eggs, breakfast meat of some kind, a whole-grain traditionally-prepared carbohydrate like oatmeal in some form (or pancakes), homemade yogurt, plenty of butter, sometimes local maple syrup, and a lacto-fermented condiment or beverage. Yesterday (Saturday) we had scrumptious apple pancakes made with locally-grown and milled whole wheat flour (from the Union Square farmers' market) and upstate apples, along with raw butter from our special source. It was a very busy day for me that included getting up early for the raw milk pick-up, rushing home to make pancakes, and rushing out again to go to Union Square for a big grocery haul, then coming home on the crowded subway to put everything away and gulp a glass of raw milk before heading out to the Raindance Farm monthly pick-up where I got some goodies from Siobhan.

Today we had time for a more leisurely meal, which included:
~Irish breakfast sausage with organic pastured pork (from Raindance Farm) -- truly DELICIOUS!!! and with a wonderful texture. I couldn't believe that even the casing on this sausage tasted so good (it was nice and brown from the griddle).
~scrambled pastured eggs from Raindance Farm (Siobhan brought them to me as a special favor; the chickens aren't really laying much yet, but they will be soon as the days get longer).
~oat cakes (made from leftover congealed oatmeal and fried in bacon fat from locally-produced pastured bacon -- and no the oatmeal was not local :( but I hope to begin eating only local oats soon courtesy of Cayuga Pure Organics!). Local maple syrup was served with the oat cakes, along with homemade yogurt made from raw, local, grass-fed milk.
~whole grain spelt & rye sourdough from Hawthorne Valley Farm with plenty of local raw butter
~also some jalapeno sauerkraut from Hawthorne Valley, located in Ghent, NY (I always finish off breakfast with something lacto-fermented or else I don't feel quite right. These foods contain beneficial bacteria and enzymes, as well as increased vitamin content from the fermentation process. The jalapeno sauerkraut is a great follow-up for egg breakfasts as it helps with digesting egg whites.)

Sitting at my computer more than four hours after finishing the meal I still feel good from breakfast! With a meal like this to start the day, often I only need one more good-sized meal, and maybe a snack before bed. This is a huge contrast to how I used to eat: grazing all day long, having hypoglycemic attacks on a daily basis, never able to go out for 10 minutes without packing a snack. And always low-fat, low-fat, low-fat. Not anymore! And contrary to the popular belief that eating more fat will make you gain weight, I actually weigh slightly less than I used to and certainly without dieting (except avoiding processed foods and sugar) -- even in winter, the time when I always packed on a few extra pounds. For Hugo and Ollie, regular meals (3x a day plus snacks) are very important; it's good to keep in mind that everyone is different, with varying requirements for protein and calories.