Candida Cleanse, Day 12: It's All in the Stock.

Last night I made some ass-kicking soup, and I will tell you about it here. But as my title suggests, soup all depends on the stock, and this was righteous stock.

I made this stock the day after Thanksgiving, with a carcass from a smallish heritage breed turkey, along with a lot of leftover vegetable parts and herbs from my Thanksgiving stuffing project, including onion skins, which gave it great color. And some added carrots. And a couple of bay leaves from my bay tree to surpass all bay trees. All in all, I got a pretty decent amount of quite delicious stock.

Then over Christmas, our basement flooded, knocking out the motor on our chest freezer. Of all the things in there, I was saddest about losing two different batches of wonderful stock.

So you can imagine my joy when we were unloading the dead freezer and taking photos of the perished food and I found that my containers of stock, since they were all pretty large, all had big chunks of ice in them, and could be refrozen.

No, maybe you cannot imagine. My joy was immense.

So I have been relishing this stock even more than usual. With half of the older batch of chicken and pork stock, and some beef bits from Greenbrier Farms (also a near loss of the freezer catastrophe) I made a Mexican-inflected beef stew. With the other half I made a chicken, veggie and lentil soup, but I went a little overboard on the carrots and parsnips and so the soup is a little too sweet for my taste. But still: it's hearty and wonderful and it has the magic stock.

Last night I used the larger portion of the Thanksgiving turkey stock, along with chorizo, kale, and beruga lentils to make a very yum soup. Proportion-wise, there is a lot of kale in there, but it works, since the kale takes on the flavor of the stock in its little curly tendrils. And the Broncos won.

Yay, soup!

Swimming this morning taxed me. I was feeling pretty depleted of energy going in, since I've still not figured out how to feel nourished on this diet, and since there seems to have been a raucous cat party from about 3 a.m. onward this morning. So I suppose it should be no surprise that I got hit with a whopper of a headache. I am now, some seven hours later, no longer in bed and feeling more human.

But I have soup for tonight, good nourishing, tasty, hearty soup.