Making stock, making stock, la la la.

I decided last night, when I looked around at my heaps of half-unpacked clothing and pieces of paper strewn across the world and sink full of dishes, that today would be housecleaning day, barring weird joint behavior. This is a strangely-timed housecleaning day, because I have EVERYTHING EVER due next week, but I was getting really frustrated with the difficulty of accessing things I need in my house, so I figured it was best to get everything done.

Before I got started on the cleaning, I started making vegetable stock! (I put off eating for somewhat too long as a result of this, by the way. I felt like I was done with the kitchen.) I had lots of ends and skins and unused bits in my freezer, and I picked up some spices on sale a while ago with this in mind, so it wasn't too difficult and was not costly at all (the only thing I bought specifically to make this stock with was two carrots, which cost me 39 cents total). One thing that was shocking: how absurdly limp celery goes when you've had it in the freezer. Celery, stop being a big baby.

If I had thought to take a picture of the sad celery, it would be right here, with the caption "Stahhhp."

My recipe so far is: put a whole bunch of random stuff into a crockpot full of water, make sure there's carrots, celery, and onion in it, and simmer forever, opening it to sniff it anxiously and stir it around far too often.

I legitimately don't remember precisely how much of each veggie is going to be in this stock. I do know that after the veggie bits, I put some rosemary, the stems of my fresh-then-frozen basil, a bay leaf, salt, pepper, and the remains of my bulb of roasted garlic in the pot. Then I started randomly throwing in cloves of garlic as I half-used them for my lunch (which was lovely, by the way, and consisted of microwaved quesadillas with cheddar, little tiny fresh garlic, and avocado, plus two clementines on the side). So it might be really garlicky. Not that that's a problem!

Back to the cleaning: so far, I've cleared my "done wall" of old post-it notes, cleaned/sanitized most of my bathroom again (the shower remains, but I'm not going to do that til right before I shower), washed my dishes, and made a sadly futile attempt to organize my kitchen counter (although I did wash and sanitize it before I cluttered it all up again, so that's a plus). I have also picked up some of my clothes and put them in the hamper, but that whole project still needs a lot of work. Aaaand now I'm blogging instead of cleaning, primarily because I am way too excited about my stock and can't leave it alone, despite the fact that it won't actually constitute food even when it's finished in like six more hours. So I'm trying to leave it alone by blogging about it.

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Update: Sooo! My friend let me know that actually, my stock was probably done after four hours. I went and tasted it. Here's how it looked:

White bowl with honey-colored liquid and a spoon.

It tasted, at first try, really really sweet (from the carrots and onions, my friends tell me), with a slight bitter undertone (possibly from the garlic or onion skins, or from the celery leaves, as the internet claims) and the other vegetables being sort of subtle. So, having thought about it for a few seconds, I went and dumped more pepper in, in a pretty large quantity. My friend told me to turn it to high for about 30 minutes and then take it out, and I did twenty minutes because I was too excited. The result was good! It tastes really... vegetably, in a balanced sort of way -- neither too sweet nor too savory, and the bitterness is not enough to overwhelm the other flavors. I ended up trying to get every last bit out of the bowl with my spoon, which was silly.

I tried to dump a bunch of it into a bowl with a strainer, before realizing that I needed to use something like a ladle rather than just trying to turn my crockpot stoneware upside down. I then pressed down on the vegetables to try to get the last of the goodness out of them, before throwing them away. (That felt bad until I realized that most of those vegetables except the carrots would have been wasted if I hadn't made the stock, just that they would have been thrown away more gradually.) I did manage to spill what felt like a lot on my counter, my floor, my pants, and my socks, so that was a little bit sad, and I used a really terrible number of dishes in the finishing process, but it's okay because now I've got the process sort of figured out. I put some of it in a tupperware in the fridge to use when cooking my next batch of rice, and I put the rest in zippered bags in the freezer.