Is there any­thing better than a hol­iday that cel­e­brates a bounty of food? I don’t think so. From the con­trived fall drinks that are mar­keted by Star­bucks (gin­ger­bread latte, anyone?) to Food Net­work spe­cials about hol­iday cooking tra­di­tions to the smell of roasted turkey bones boiling in a pot of water, we col­lec­tively cel­e­brate our love of eating foods that remind us of the late autumn – har­vest time. And while most of us are (or ought to be) rou­tinely thankful for the fact that we can enjoy pork ten­der­loin, per­fectly cooked green beans, fair trade dark choco­late, fresh cher­ries, or dried mango; this is the time of year when we say it loud and proud: “thank you [deity] for all of this [explica­tive] great food and for the absolutely glut­to­nous way I’m about to eat it.”

I par­tic­u­larly enjoy learning about and par­tic­i­pating in food tra­di­tions. Thanks­giving is an obvious one. There are many other food tra­di­tions that may be less fes­tive or involved but still impor­tant to a person’s cul­tural fabric. Every time I visit North Car­olina I try to have some pulled pork. Many people I know make a point of vis­iting their local state fair every year. Here in the big city, there are sea­sonal or annual events fea­turing spe­cific food genres or sea­sonal ingre­di­ents. My mother reg­u­larly made a seem­ingly odd but very com­forting dish when I was a kid (some­thing my sister still loves): spanish rice, chopped hot dogs, and corn. Every morning I wake up and boil water to make a pot of green tea.

Lately I’ve been working to estab­lish a new food tra­di­tion: weekly bread baking. It’s an early suc­cess. Thanks­giving has inspired me to con­sider adding a second peri­odic activity: making stock.

Boiling turkey carcass

After the Thanks­giving turkey meat is fin­ished, we are left with the bones. Bones are the base of a good stock. This year, I searched for some advice on how best to uti­lize the bones. I stum­bled upon a gold­mine of cooking thought and trivia: Michael Ruhlman’s blog. Ruhlman is a food writer and (like Alton Brown) advo­cates skillful yet prac­tical home cooking through the acqui­si­tion of basic cooking fun­da­men­tals. I devoured (pun intended) his book “The Making of a Chef” and am very inter­ested in his latest offering, “Ratio”. Com­bining infor­ma­tion from his posting about turkey stock with infor­ma­tion from “The Pro­fes­sional Chef”, I sim­mered the turkey car­cass for a few hours. Once the apart­ment was thor­oughly sat­u­rated with the aroma of turkey (again), I added chopped onion, green onion, celery, mar­joram, thyme, bay leaf, pep­per­corns, garlic, and a little bit of soy sauce. After another hour of sim­mering the mix­ture was poured through a metal colander into a bowl and then ladled from the bowl through a strainer lined with cheese­cloth into a clean pot for cooling.

I have zero expe­ri­ence with stocks. I don’t know the dif­fer­ence between a good one and a bad one in terms of color or flavor. My turkey stock has a pretty good color. The flavor is a little weak, but I can’t say if that’s due to a lack of salt. It pos­sesses a nice turkey essence. Per­haps that’s the goal. Once it’s cooled, I can figure out what to do with it.

If the stock is a suc­cess, I hope to repeat the process with chicken. For the normal price of cheap, bone­less chicken breasts ($3.99/lb), I can buy a whole organic chicken at a Whole Foods market. Roasting chicken shouldn’t be any more dif­fi­cult that roasting turkey. Once I’ve cleaned the bird for all the meat (which can then be used in any number of week-day prepa­ra­tions), I’ll boil the bones and see if the result is any better than the canned chicken stock I get from the store.

Browsing around SOHO today (we went to Crate and Barrel and Sur La Table), I reflected on how much joy is pos­sible through good cooking. The end product is only the final shade of joy (unless you count the pleasant feeling of full­ness that fol­lows). The whole process of con­ceiving a meal, plan­ning a recipe, obtaining ingre­di­ents, preparing them care­fully, and serving them to your­self and others is an endeavor that engages cre­ativity, chal­lenges the body, and sat­is­fies the senses. And any­thing you’ve made on your own tastes better for the effort applied. I also feel a con­nec­tion to his­tory. There is my own child­hood (watching my mother cook, or eating some­thing my grandmother’s made) as well as the cen­turies of food prep knowl­edge upon which modern cui­sine is based. While the methods change over time, the prepa­ra­tion and con­sump­tion of food in a human society – dare I say, ‘gas­tronomy’ – is always worthy of a bit of grateful celebrating.

So thank you, [deity], for the good for­tune of fine food and folk to share it with.