Cooking adventures

Update on the beef stock.  No, I did not die.  I did feel a bit sick the next day, and was convinced I’d somehow cooked up a whole batch of piping hot biohazard.  My grandmother came to the rescue though (of the stock, at the very least!).  She assured me that cooling on the stove overnight is standard practice, bravely tasted it, and pronounced it safe and fine. 

I must say that in thirty four years, I’ve never had food poisoning from her kitchen, which is better than I can say for my own.  My grandmother knows how to cook, so I took her word for it.  I froze about six litres of stock, and cooked up a big pot of beef and vegetable soup with the rest, diluted.  The soup was fine; quite tasty and hearty actually, and I thanked my babushka with a jar of it. 

Still no idea how the meat from the stock made me sick.  Maybe my digestion just took a little time to adjust or something.  So, that was my second recent diet adventure.  The first was a chicken soup, which tasted even better.  (Babushka’s recipe, can’t go wrong.) 

I just realised, I still haven’t written about what this diet change is all about, have I?  I’m trying a Weston Price diet to cure my sensitive teeth.  I’ve been doing some reading and discovered that tooth decay is not an inevitable thing, and as recently as the 1930’s a lot of people following traditional diets – both hunter-gatherer and agrarian – didn’t suffer from it.  That makes a lot of sense to me.  Toothache and the loss of teeth is so utterly awful I just can’t believe this is the best we can expect.  

So anyway, I’m eating the bone broths for calcium and other minerals, and also for the gelatin.  It’s also an easy way to prepare vegetables and meat, so I eat more healthily than I have been.  Nice and cheap, too.  Bones and cheap cuts of meat are relatively affordable, and I’m lucky to have a free-range butcher locally.  I swear, this is still very strange for a girl raised vegetarian!