My Market Year(s)

Yesterday was gray and cool so I decided to get some cooking done in the morning.  I ended up cooking at both ends of the spectrum: long-and-slow and quick-and-simple.

I pre-heated the oven to 425F to bake bones to make beef stock.  Stock-making is a religion with more liturgies than modern Christianity.  To French purists, the bones should be cleaned of all meat and blood and scrubbed thoroughly before roasting (to make a brown stock).  This produces a beautiful clear stock which is a blank canvas upon which other flavors are painted.  To others, stocks should be made of meat with lots of connective tissues (for the collagen) so they taste like beef or chicken or lamb or veal.  Some want rich marrow bones, other consider the marrow to be too strong a flavor.  Some believe you should add mirepoix and tomato, others are purist in their desires.  The arguments can run so deep and long that they would impress a gathering of rabbis.

I had heated the oven to roast the bones to make my stock.   I will confess I am no purist.  My stock is a mix of meat and marrow bones.  When I make my stock I add, half way through roasting, two quartered onions, several carrots, and two stalks of celery.  About 20 minutes later, I smear the bones with 2 to 3 tablespoons of tomato paste and let this roast for another 10 to 15 minutes until it darkens and starts to brown.  Then everything into a pot with bay leaves and a handful of peppercorns to simmer for 36 hours.

But I drift off-topic now.  This is where my story begins.

I figured that, since I had the oven on to roast the bones, I should bake something else.  It was already pretty hot (425F) so I decided to make  Mark Bittman’s take on Sardinian Flatbread.   I call it “carte matza” but you will have to watch his short bit to understand why.  His recipe is quick and easy and great fun.  The bread it produces is like a very light water cracker.  It is almost like cotton candy meets cracker.   It takes about 5 minutes to mix up the dough.  You cook each piece for 3 or 4 minutes in a 500F oven.  I cook three at a time so there are four batches.  It can take much longer to heat the oven that to actually mix, roll and cook 12 pieces.

This is where the bundling up comes in.  I decided, since the oven was most of the way there, I would turn it up and make some bread.  This is actually an old tradition.   In Boston, the bakers would heat up their wood-fired ovens and bake bread.  At the end of the day, the housewives would bring their bean pots with their beans down to cook in the ovens as they cooled.

We have friends in Oregon who own a Bed-and-Breakfast and restaurant.  They built a wood fired pizza oven for their dinner menu.  They stoke the oven during the day and get it very hot then cook pizzas for evening dinners.  The next morning, the oven has cooled and they make warm sweet breads for breakfasts and rolls and bread for the rest of the day’s meals.  Heat once, cook twice.

Though I’m going the opposite direction hot to hotter, the idea is the same: waste less energy and cook two things back-to-back.  In Summer, you also heat up your kitchen once rather than twice.  By planning a bit ahead, I did something that would take a long time and that is a little fussy.  Actually stock isn’t really that fussy – it just takes tending, checking the flame, giving it an occasional stir.  I also made something quick and easy.  Now, we have stock bubbling away heading slowly towards a fabulous soup with a frittata and greens and we have flatbread for lunch that I will serve with a diced shrimp salad.

Heat once, cook twice and you can get well along in your weekend meals.