Bone Broth/Stock

This should be a staple in everyone’s freezer/kitchen repertoire. There is nothing as satisfying, useful and nutritious as a good bone stock. This is also a great way to get the really good animal fats into your diet, plus all the collagen (good for joints, soft tissue), CLA, etc, at an affordable price. You can usually get good bones from any small farm that raises 100% grass-fed beef for about $1 to $2 /lb (sometimes even free). Also, some of the best poultry stock is made using the chicken (or turkey) feet, which have tons of collagen (there is some truth behind your grandmother’s insistence on chicken soup to heal colds and flus, but not those commercial soups. She was talking about this–the real thing!).
Anyway, making stock is really easy. I know a lot of people say it has to be a specified amount of time for one kind of meat/bone, another amount of time for another kind of meat. Personally, I always just throw a bunch of chicken bones into my huge stock pot (my local co-op sells all kinds of bones [and feet] really cheap in the freezer section, from locally raised organic, free-range chickens, or I get them from a friend’s farm up the road), sometimes organ meats, plus a bunch of local organic, grass-fed beef marrow bones. If we’ve had a roasted chicken or turkey, I throw the rest of that in too. I fill the pot about 3/4 or more full of water, add a little vinegar (this helps pull the calcium from the bones into your stock) bring it to a boil for about 20 minutes, then turn it down to a full simmer/very low boil, and leave it for about 18 hours or so. Sometimes I add carrots, onions, garlic, celery, maybe some maitake or shitake mushrooms, astragalus, herbs, whatever, for the last couple of hours. Sometimes I just do celtic sea salt and black pepper. Fenugreek is a great spice to put in (I think it was the secret to that Campbell’s chicken soup of my childhood that tasted so good but was SO awful for you–full of way too much sodium and who-knows-what-else), also turmeric.  Once it’s done simmering all that time, I strain it through a fine-mesh sieve. I make enough that I can freeze a whole bunch in pint-sized jars and just pull it out of the freezer whenever I need it–just for a quick cup of broth in the morning, or to make soups or sauces.