Cooking Basics: Browned Chicken Stock

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As the weather continues to cool down I find myself wanting soup more and more often. I think soup is just about as close as you can get to the perfect meal: warm, comforting, balanced and great for wither lunch or dinner (and in some cultures even for breakfast!). I usually make my soup with boxed stock, but nothing beats homemade soup made with homemade stock. This browned chicken stock is a great base for almost any soup – it’s richer than regular chicken stock, but the chicken flavor isn’t so overpowering that you can’t use it in a vegetable based soup too. I most recently used it in my Pho Ba, and it was wonderful. If you have a few hours one afternoon to let the ingredients simmer, you can easily make enough of this delicious stock to last you through a few pots of soup. Just divide it into smaller containers and freeze it – since you can cook it right from froze, you’ll be able to make a great homemade soup whenever you want. [….]

Daring Cooks: Quick and Easy Chicken Pho (Pho Ba)

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The October 2009 Daring Cooks’ challenge was brought to us by Jaden of the blog Steamy Kitchen. The recipes are from her new cookbook, The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook. I’ll be honest here – I wasn’t particularly excited about this challenge. I’ve made pho before, and I love it, but I didn’t want to do a second post on it. Plus, the main recipe presented to us was for chicken pho, and I don’t usually care for chicken soups. So I dragged my feet on completing this challenge and didn’t make it until last night. I’m glad I did though, because it was really good, and really EASY. Crazy easy. 90% of the ingredients are things that I generally have on hand (and the other 10% could be omitted or swapped) so this is a great recipe to keep in the back of your mind for when dinner hasn’t been planned. And the best part is that it makes very few dishes, so cleanup is a breeze![….]

Habanero Hot Sauce

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Last week I promised you a recipe for habanero hot sauce, but I ended up getting side-tracked by a few exciting (and top-secret) projects and didn’t have time to post it. But here you go! I made this sauce to go with the tamales that we had a few nights ago, but I’ve also used it in a few different ways since. It’s a great way to jazz up a frozen burrito, and its also pairs nicely with eggs. I’m planning to use it later this week in a squash hash as well. You might want to scale down the recipe a little – that’s a 12-ounce bottle you see up there – but this is a really nice condiment to keep around.

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