CHEESESLAVE

I am making All-Day Beef Stew from “Nourishing Traditions” for our Sunday night dinner. I am marinating 3 pounds of stew beef (grass-fed) in a cup of red wine in the bowl of my crock pot in the fridge.

Tomorrow morning I’ll take it out and add 4 cups of beef stock, some peeled tomatoes, a bit of tomato paste, and some spices. Then I’ll let it cook all day.

I made the beef stock (my first time making beef stock) with roasted oxtails and marrow bones which simmered in the crock pot for two whole days. I can’t believe I’ve lived this long and have never made beef stock before.

After I let the beef stock cool overnight in the fridge, I scraped the fat off the top and put it in a container. We can use that later for cooking. Maybe I’ll use it to make homemade French fries.

That will make 3 dishes I can make out of one package of marrow bones:

Marrow on toast (which we ate last week with leftover Chicken and White Bean Chili)
Beef Stew (the bones made the stock)
French Fries (cooked with the fat from the stock)

It’s amazing how far food goes when you know how to cook it.

I’m so fascinated at how much I am learning from this one cookbook. Kombucha and marrow bones and kefir and chicken stock and curds and whey… so many things I have learned.

I have two nannies now (Alla and Yensi) and one housekeeper (Carla). Alla, who is Russian, who comes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Yensi, from Guatemala, is here Tuesdays and Thursdays. Carla, our housekeeper, comes every Monday. She is from Honduras.

All three women, on separate occasions, have expressed amazement that I cook the way their mothers and grandmothers used to cook in their native lands.

Alla was stunned when she realized that I was making kombucha — what she calls “mushroom tea”. “Oh my god!” she said. “I drank this all my life in Russia!” Same with the kefir. “We drank it every day. We used to put it in our hair.”

Yensi pointed to the kefir that I was straining into curds and whey (I use the whey for Kate’s baby formula, for homemade mayonnaise, for beet kvass, for sauerkraut, etc.). She said, “We make cheese like this in Guatemala! And we always make this soup,” she said, pointing to the beef stock.

She also said that her whole life in Guatemala, she always drank raw milk, never pasteurized. (Did I mention that she has perfect teeth?)

Carla, too, said her family always boiled bones in Honduras. “We use the chicken necks, too,” she said, smiling.

But back to tomorrow’s beef stew…

At the end of the day, you add some sliced carrots and potatoes to the stew. I might add some parsnips too, which the recipe doesn’t call for. And fresh parsley from my garden. Whatever we don’t eat, I’ll freeze. It will make a good meal on a night that I don’t feel like cooking. And great lunches for Kate.

And we might eat the last few pieces of the sourdough spelt bread I baked last week — which I froze. That will be yummy slathered with raw butter.

Time to bake another loaf…

By the way, speaking of homemade sourdough bread. Once you’ve tasted this bread, you can never go back to storebought. It’s that good.