While we cut up stuff for a Caldo de Res crockpot yesterday, it was so cool to just throw the onion peelings, carrot ends, etc. into the stock urn. We did quite a bit of cooking yesterday and all the ugly bits when into the urn. Topped off with water, and plugged in, we just LEFT it. Nothing to tend, so easy.

CALDO is a Mexican dish ("cauldron of stuff") that amounts to pot roast or beef stew. Chuck roast, cut up or left whole, is browned and crocked along with veggies on hand. Yesterday, in went the last of the canned chipotles in adobo, some chicken-pork stock from the freezer (blend tastes like turkey stock), a little tomato paste, cumin....

It smelled so good! But by the time we were hungry for a late lunch, the stock urn had produced a thin stock good enough to tap off a couple of cups for a mock Italian Wedding soup knock-off with XL couscous and the dried-up cooked chicken I'd taken off the bone for the stock experiment. That held us off till the Caldo was ready for the evening meal, by which time the stock urn had also run its course more fully.

We congratulated ourselves at the amount of food we cooked and made freezer-ready (some other meats), with hot liquid meals to fend off the colds we were coming down with.


And that reminds me-- SICK SOUP. I may have written about this before. This evolved when we had three growth-spurting teens under the roof, and it's good to have that stock urn to start it again.

Whenever I make a crockpot or soup meal, I try to freeze at least one quart jar of it-- it's easy, because by the time we get to the bottom of the crock we're tired of it. Later, when we're that awful day arrives when we're all sick and no one can get to the store-- especially in bad winter driving-- there is the Sick Soup in the back of the freezer.

There is usually a mild chicken-based one and a spicy beef-based one. It thaws in the microwave (laid on its side with the lid off), in a glass dish to catch the spills.

Because these jarfuls have usually come from the end of the crockpot's consumption, they're concentrated from the evaporation. Thinning them with a splash of milk (or juice or water, depending on the illness) makes healing, all-day-sipped soup for two.

~Susan