Cooking at home from our San Francisco Food Tour of North Beach\Little Italy and Chinatown, sometimes I have one of those days where I really want some kind of comfort food. For me, comfort food usually involves chicken in one way or another. It could be chicken soup, chicken and dumplings, even something like roast chicken. Yet, going through the process of making the food helps it become more of a comfort food. It could be that the process of making the food get my mind off whatever is bothering me, or it could be that making it help me feel like I have some control of what’s going on around me. The result is I like to start off my chicken soup with making my own chicken stock, if I can. it takes a couple of hours, however, in reality it’s not very hard. I just start off by cutting up from vegetables like carrots, onions, water, spices, and whatever chicken parts I have left in the refrigerator or freezer. Since I like doing that when I make something with chicken, any leftover chicken, when I’m making a chicken dish, I like to put in the freezer or the refrigerator and use it to make stock. The result is whenever I make something like chicken soup, chicken and dumplings, or roast chicken I can use my own stock, which tends do you have much better flavor then when I buy the grocery store. At the same time, when I want comfort food somehow knowing that is my own stock helps to make that food even more comforting.
On our San Francisco food tours, I’ve noticed that most of our stops are like me, they like to make their own stock rather than buying it from a store. I’m not sure whether that stock is better or worse than what you can buy in a store, however I think by making their own stock they’re like me and it’s comforting to know what’s in the stock that they’re using and also knowing that it’s their own stock, which makes it only that more special.
