WELCOME TO OUR KITCHEN: Bruce is still cooking for the ailing Mark!

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast, Cooking with Bruce and Mark. I'm alone, again, because Mark is still recovering from his broken leg, so I'm going to take you through a one minute cooking tip. I'm going to talk about what kind of foods to make when you're not feeling well and when you're recovering from things like broken legs. And I'm going to tell you what's making me happy in food this week. So let's get started.

Our one minute cooking tip, don't break your leg. I know it doesn't sound like a cooking tip, but as you know, Mark did break his leg last month and he's still fairly immobile. and non weight bearing, and no, he's not been able to cook anything in all this time. I even make his tea for him, but if you do break your leg, be kind to the person who does cook for you. Mark is so nice to me, and in the rest of this podcast, I'm going to tell you what I've been cooking for him while he's been healing.

Before I get to the next segment, I want to ask you to please rate this podcast, wherever you get your podcast, you can give us a rating, you can leave a review, just scroll down the page, you'll find a place to leave a review. We are unsupported, we'd like to stay that way. And what really helps is ratings and great reviews. So thanks for that.

When you're sick, you need certain kinds of foods to help you recover faster. Protein is huge, which is why chicken soup is so good when you're sick. If you make it yourself from chickens, the soup sets up like jelly in the fridge, and that gelatin is simply protein. All the cartilage and skin breaks down as it boils and cooks, and it turns into gelatin. You don't get that jelly from canned or boxed chicken soups or chicken stocks. You only get that when you make it yourself from scratch.

So I do that. And I'm really lucky because I have a local farm Howling Flats Farm in Litchfield County, not far from us. And Kelly, who runs it, raises chickens. And I'm not sure how she sells the chicken meat, but she always gets back from the processor the carcasses with the legs and thighs cut off and the breast meat cut off. But otherwise, it's this fabulous chicken carcass with the back, with the wings.

And she lets me have them in five pound packages, which come to about three to four chicken carcasses per package. And I pile them into the biggest stockpot I have, which is like a 20 quart lobster pot. And I add onions and I add carrots and I add parsley and dill and some garlic, which I know is controversial, especially in the Jewish chicken soup world, but I do add garlic.

and I fill it with water and I let that simmer all day and by the time I scoop everything out, I have the richest, chickeniest, proteiniest, rich broth you can imagine. So that is one of the things I've been putting into all of the soups and stews I make them as a base, is that homemade chicken soup. When I was a kid, my grandmother always put chicken feet in the soup because they have a lot of protein, a lot of cartilage breaks down, into the soup, and they becomes even richer.

And while I think that richness is really great, feet do give chicken soup a very particular taste and one or two feet is fine. I once found a giant bag of chicken feet at a Chinese market. And I thought, Oh, wow, this is going to make the best chicken soup ever. So the only chicken I put in this soup was this bag of feet and. Really it ended up being foot soup and it wasn't anything I would have served to company.

So if you do find chicken feet or if you like putting chicken feet in your soup, I recommend limiting it to one or two chicken feet per pot of soup. Otherwise, not my favorite. Mark asked for chicken and dumplings the other night, and that's a lot of protein, a lot of dairy and fat, which is also good for healing. I'll talk about that in a minute.

I had made chicken and dumpling recipes for our copycat books, like the Instant Pot copycat book and I know they have chicken and dumplings like at Bob Evans and we had to come up with a way to do that and it is sort of like a creamy, rich chicken stew and in those restaurant versions, the dumplings are usually just almost bits of dough, almost thick pasta kind of dough or even pie crusty dough that you then cook in the stew, but that's not what Mark wanted.

He wanted it with light fluffy dumplings that get dropped on top of the stew and then they steam when it's covered and they become really light and they almost fall apart and thicken the stew. So here's what I did. I had a package of those chicken carcasses from Howling Flats Farm and I put them in my big 10 court instant pot. And I threw in a carrot and an onion and celery. So here's a trick for using celery in stocks when you're going to throw the vegetables away.

I took a new whole head of celery out and I cut off the bottom, you know, the part you're going to throw away anyway. And I threw that in the pot with the chickens and the carrot and some parsley. And I let that go at high pressure, oh, for about an hour and a half. It took another hour for a natural release. And then when I opened it, I took out the carcasses. Now, they were falling apart, so I had to be really careful. And I used one of those big Chinese strainers. They call them spiders.

Well, I used that to pull out all the chicken and I laid it out on a lipped. baking sheet for it to cool. And I pulled off all the meat from those carcasses. I ended up with six cups of chicken meat. It was incredible. So now, I put a pot on the stove, and I melted some butter, and I threw in chopped onions, and carrots, and garlic, and celery. And I sauteed that all up for about ten minutes. I really wanted to get those vegetables lightly, lightly browned.

Then, I threw in a couple tablespoons of flour, and I tossed that around until the flour was cooked, then went in six cups of that delicious chicken soup I had made. It thickened up a bit in culinary terms that is now a velouté when you thicken broth without any dairy, but this is chicken and dumplings, and it has to have dairy. And so I opened a can of condensed milk, not sweetened condensed milk. It has evaporated milk. I used the full fat.

I I added some fresh thyme, some fresh sage, and I let that simmer for about 15 minutes, threw all the chicken back in, and then I made these amazing dumplings. Was just flour, and baking powder, and salt, and sour cream, and melted butter, and it's just a dough that you drop on top. It's almost like if you're making a cobbler, it's that kind of dough. Covered it. Let it go 20 minutes and those dumplings rose and became light and the soup was delicious and rich.

Man, if that didn't heal his bone, I don't know what would. But he also asked for another soup and this one Killed me because he said make me a beef vegetable soup. Doesn't that usually just come out of a can? So of course, it's me. So I had a rack of prime rib bones in the freezer Of course, who doesn't and I threw them in the oven and I roasted them at 400 degrees for an hour Until they were really well done Those went into a pot with just water, green beans, carrots, parsnips, onions.

That cooked for a few hours. All the cartilage of those bones came off. All the meat came off. I chopped up the meat, I threw out the bones. When that soup was cold, it was so jellified. It was like head cheese. I don't know if you've ever had that, but that's like when you boil a whole head of an animal and all the meat comes off and the liquid turns into jelly and you slice it and eat it like charcuterie. That was basically this beef vegetable soup.

But I want to go back to talking about dairy and fat because I brought it up before. You know when you break a bone, you need more calcium. And we found out that calcium needs fat to be absorbed and do its magic in your body. So, while nonfat dairy has a lot of calcium, it's not as useful to your body as the calcium in full fat or reduced fat dairy. So, I switched Mark's morning lattes. from skim milk to 2 percent milk.

He's gone from nonfat yogurt to 2%, but I will admit I made the mistake of getting him sweetened vanilla on the last trip to the store. Whoops, he likes plain, so he just skipped the honey and still piles on the blueberries and everything is fine in the morning. What else have I made for him while he's been sick? Well, we did a goat tagine with figs and olives.

Sort of a riff on a recipe from our book, Cooking Know How, which tells you how to do a whole bunch of dishes step by step, breaks it down, there's pictures as you go, and I used that tagine technique using goat stew meat, also from Howling Flats Farms. And I used dried figs and green olives. And that was amazing yesterday for lunch. Yes, just for lunch. I made a tray of eggplant parm. And yeah, pulled out my homemade marinara from the freezer from last summer from the fresh tomatoes.

Tonight we're having red. Cooking pork belly, which if you don't know what that is, it's a Chinese traditional way of braising meats, usually fatty meats, with soy sauce, which when you braise it a long time gets on a red hue. But you also caramelize some sugar and you toss the meat in that. You add star anise, there's cinnamon. I'm gonna probably put a piece of dry tangerine peel in it.

It's gonna get chestnuts and parsnips and we're gonna serve it with brown rice normally I think I would make these steamed buns because then you could take the pork belly out and Just sandwich it between the steamed buns, and I would like it better that way, but Painkillers can cause constipation, so eating high fiber is really important.

So I have a large stash of sumo oranges, which we eat a lot of, and we're eating a lot of brown rice, and I've been baking whole grain breads to go with all of those. And the other thing, it's hard because I'm trying to balance calories and comfort, and it's great to have all these wonderful foods to heal, but Mark's not exercising right now, he can't really move easily, and know he does not want to gain much weight over these two months.

And I will end this segment by saying that just this morning, Mark said that if I ever break my leg, I had better like scrambled eggs, because that's all I'll be getting.

What's making me happy in food this week? Peanut butter chocolate chip biscotti. I have been getting Mark out of the house every week to teach his lecture at a local library on Henry James and Paul Cezanne. Yes, he is comparing the two of them and what they each do in their art and it's really an Amazing lecture series. We get him out into the car. He has a knee scooter that helps him get into the library. There are no steps.

And since I'm going every week, I'm baking and bringing treats with me. And these peanut butter chocolate chip biscotti are amazing. super thick, super double baked, crunchy, crunchy, crunchy. And even our friend Helen, who comes to the lectures, sent me an email to tell me that she thought they were life changing. So that's our podcast for this week. Thank you for listening.

Please go to our Facebook group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark, and tell us there what's making you happy in food this week. I know Mark would love to find out what is making you happy. And if it's really good, maybe I'll make it for him, or we'll talk about it here on another episode of Cooking with Bruce and Mark.