We make large batches of stock; beef, chicken, veggie, and sometimes, lamb, and turkey, which we freeze so we can make soup any old night. We also make mystery stock. We save all the bones from anything we cook. Roast chicken bones, bones from a steak, Lamb tagine bones, and so on. They all go into a big bag in the freezer until the bag is full. At that point we make a stock. It's always different and always SO tasty!

One thing that I got from elsa was to save your vegetable parings, ends, bits, skins, and so on and stick em in a bag or container in the freezer as you go along, so whenever you need to make quickie vegetable broth, you have makings on hand. I also save meat and chicken bones and boil them down for broth to freeze, but my freezer is so weeny I can only keep a little at a time. I'd love to have a big enough freezer to have lots of all this, plus a cornucopia of precooked things for my lazy or uninspired days (which are many).

If I ever become homeless, though, I'm moving into arse_hat's freezer. Either that, or the end of his driveway.

I misread your tite as "you know what really got me high last night - my soup" and was thinking, girl you're not supposed to eat those mushrooms!

(I have a very strange dyslexia it seems)

mmmmh... hallucinogenic soup.

No, m'am; it was good, but not that good. But you should try my peyote pâté!

I made this the other night and it's really good: butternut squash and ginger soup.

I also made my own chutney last weekend which turned out really well. Soooooooo tasty and so full of spices.

How did you make the chutney?

I made a fairly large batch with 8 or 9 onions, a couple of red bell peppers, some raisins, a whole head of garlic, a good amount of fresh ginger, muscovado sugar, tomato puree, balsamic and red wine vinegars and quite a lot of spices.

I'm at work now and have had internets problems at home since Sunday, but I'll try and post the full list of ingredients tonight - I actually managed to write them down for once.

oh, good!

I made jap chae, which I had never heard of until this AskMe. It was sooooooo good, and gorgeous. Next time I'm going to try it with raw veggies instead of cooked.

Nice! And something I could make, ingredient-wise - though I would have to substitute rice noodles. Did your carrots look like that? And if so, how dee doo dat?

Girl, I will see your Indecisive Chowder and raise you my Pseudo Gumbo that I made last Friday night and which I think may have been the most perfect soup EVAR, indeed, the platonic ideal of soups. Here is what I did.

Made black beans in the crockpot all day Friday, by, a) soaking them over Thursday night and then rinsing, putting in the crock pot with water, a vidalia onion cut in quarters and some strange ham/back bacon/fatback like thing that I got from the weird meats section of the supermarket for $2. Then when I got home, I chopped and sauteed in olive oil:
another vidalia
4 or 5 cloves of garlic
1/2 a banana pepper, seeds intact
1/2 a jalapeno, seeds intact
1 bell pepper, seeds removed ;-)
Then when those were soft, I put them in a big soup pot and chopped & sauteed
5 carrots
2 celery ribs (that always sounds so weird)
Then those went into the soup pot and into the frying pan went
2 andouille sausages
Meanwhile I cut up 2 chicken breasts and dredged them in flour & Tony Chacheres; they got browned after the sausages went into the soup pot and then in they went too.
Also into the soup pot went two cups of the black beans and a cup of frozen corn, a box of chicken broth and a big can of diced tomatos, a bunch of oregano, thyme, salt, pepper and a bay leaf. Brought it all just to a low boil, took it down to a simmer and left it all alone for an hour and a half.

It was so good we ate it again the next night and that night I threw in some kale and heated it all for 30 minutes; it was even better.

Oh, that sounds yummy taz. I made a slow cooker potato chowder yesterday, but it was disappointing. It was a Weight Watchers recipe that a friend gave to me, so I guess that was the problem. It had too many carrots and cooking all day somehow made everything taste like the black pepper. And using fat free half-and-half and fat free evaporated milk to thicken it gave it a weird mouth feel. I mean, it was ok, but I bet I could make up a better soup that wouldn't be that much higher in calories. I did like that it included barley. Yum, barley.

Also, I discovered that my dog is absolutely terrified of the beeps that my slow cooker makes when you push the buttons. Like, hiding in the farthest room, panting, with tail tucked between her legs terrified. WTF.

yum! More recipes! mgl, that sounds scrummy.

Misskaz, I don't really see the major benefit of the fat-free milk in a dish like this... Sure, it save a few calories, but I would guess only a very few if you don't make chowder with tons of cream or milk to begin with. I used regular full-fat canned milk, but most of the cooking is with water, then I just put in enough milk at the simmering stage to give it that bit of extra richness, smoothness, or whatever. I don't even know how much I put in, but - maybe a quarter of a cup? For a whole pot of soup. So saving those calories wouldn't amount to much.

Also, carrots can be a problem - especially in long-cook dishes, I think. They are just too sweet that way for me, so I either use not a lot of carrot to begin with, or toss it in closer to the end of the cooking time. I could definitely see how a slow-cooker dish with a lot of carrot could come out tasting same-y.

taz, yeah I have a feeling with a little tweaking I could make it into a good recipe that is still decently low in fat and calories. But now I have the problem of the dog being terrified of the slow cooker, hee!

Have some compassion for that poor dog, and send your slow cooker to meeeeeeeee!

taz, I used a mandolin thingamabob to julienne the carrots.

Last night was yummy food night at MetaChat, apparently! I'm making ravioli and salad and garlic bread tonight, in case anyone's interested. I'm basically building the meal around the fabulous garlic bread at Wegman's. They take half a loaf of store baked italian bread and slather it with herbed butter (I think it has garlic, parsley and oregano in it) and then top it with sliced tomatoes, fresh basil leaves and romano cheese. This is what it looks like before baking:

≡ Click to see image ≡

I don't eat it but my husband is a freak for it.

I've more or less given up on my slow cooker except for ingredients - it does great dried beans that you can then use in other things, for example, and it makes Boston butt into something that you can then turn into excellent pulled pork barbecue, but as for putting stuff in it in the morning, turning it on and coming home to dinner? No. Not so hot. Everything turns out bland and mushy and blah. It's great for like four hours - I made a good turkey breast in it a couple weekends ago - but I'm finding that 8 - 10 hour thing is useless. Most foods just can't sustain it. Dairy based soups are quick usually anyway and I always add the milk (I usually use a mix of 2% and low fat sour cream, since that's what I always have on hand) just at the very end; I don't think dairy cooked that long is ever going to taste right.

You know what I got that I love very, very much? A lidded clay pot cooker (one of these) that you soak before using, and whatever you cook comes out very moist and delicious. We did a chicken that blew our socks off, and our usual method was already really moist and great, but this was something else.

I don't have technique down for this yet, though, so I don't know a lot of stuff to do with it. I'd like to maybe try a cassoulet-type thing.

Chili is pretty much the perfect crockpot dish, it seems to me.

Okay, here we go. I can't help thinking I wrote down the amount of sugar wrong, but as it was a "eh, that looks like it should be alright" quantity, you'll have to see! It was a little less than a quarter of a 500g bag, IIRC, although I wrote down 180g for some reason.

Anyway:

Soften sliced onions, crushed garlic, fresh ginger and peppers
Once they're nice and soft (don't brown them), add a pretty good squeeze of tomato puree and give it a good stir.
Then add **some amount** of muscovado sugar and let that melt. Brown sugar is okay, but you don't get the depth of flavour that muscovado has,
Whilst that's doing, get this lot ready:

Note: unless stated, these are all non-ground amounts:

2 or 3 cardamon pods
1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon caraway seeds
3 teaspoons coriander seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1.5 teaspoons black pepper corns
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3 cloves
3/4 teaspoon crushed dried chilli
1/2 star anis
good pinch of salt

Got those? Okay, grind them all down nice and fine, fishing out any cardamon pod skin. Once the sugar in the pan is liquid, add the spice mix in with 3 or 4 bay leaves. Give that lot a stir and let it cook for a few minutes. Then add 1 cup balsamic vinegar and 3/4 cup red wine vinegar, bring it up to a gentle simmer and let it cook down until it's thick and yummy.

It's fairly easy to adjust the tang of this by adding sugar/vinegar until you're happy with it.

Is it chutney? Pickle? I dunno.

oh yeah, I threw in a few raisins part way through as well. And I've just checked and it was about 1/4 of a 500g bag of sugar.