Cheater's Chicken Broth

This lesson is dedicated to all of the women in my classes who refuse to make homemade chicken broth.

Lord knows, I’ve tried to instill in their taste buds the importance of the unparalleled flavor that only a homemade broth can bring to foods. It is liquid love. It is the secret behind the secret.

To their credit, these women have taken heaps of instruction of mine to heart, and not only want to feed their loved ones well but actually do so. They just aren’t going to make broth from scratch.

I accept my defeat. It’s me versus modernity. Someday, I pray we’ll return to homemade broth and handwritten love poetry. Until then, I insist that if you’re going to cheat, at least make my Cheater’s Chicken Broth!

Here’s how:

• Buy your broth in an organic box, not a can. The quality will be much better.

• Add “life” to the broth. To erase the industrial flavor of pre-made broths and add homemade flavor, choose at least three of the following “live” ingredients and boil them in your boxed broth covered for 20 minutes, if not more: a carrot or a baby carrot, a piece of celery or celery leaves, a bay leaf, a sprig of parsley, a piece of onion or its skin, a sprig of thyme, the dark green top of a leek, or the skin of a potato.

Use this Cheater’s Chicken Broth for making risottos, meat sauces, braised meats or–gulp–in a soup…BUT DO NOT expect this to hold up in actual chicken soup. If you make fresh matzo balls, for example. and serve them in a broth that’s not homemade (Nancy Pritikin Ruttenberg, I’m talking to you!), you’ll cause legions of dead grandmothers to rise from the dead in exasperated anguish. And when these zombie grandmothers close in on you, demanding to know why you served mediocre broth an you’re wearing ripped pants, the rest of the Meal and a Spiel community and I will sip homemade chicken soup surrounded by the light of fluttering angels whose every wing-beat sings I told you so!

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