Me and Thomas - we're tight!

Thomas Keller and I are like this (picture arm held out at 90 degrees with crossing fingers and some expressive grimace). We both like to cook! That's enough, right?

I'm just about finished The Soul of a Chef, by Michael Ruhlman, and, coincidentally he was writing about the precision with which Thomas Keller approaches the making of stock, "le fond de cuisine".

"The ideology of a stock needs to be understood. . . it all goes back to respect. . . sometimes I think we should blanch the bones twice. This would result in cleaner bones and ultimately a cleaner finished sauce. . . you bring the liquid up to heat slowly, not violently. . . you never want abrupt temperature change when cooking. "

This evening I had it in my soul to do something with Chorizo. As a close friend that I work with knows, I've been fixated on chorizo for a week now (God forbid, she tried to point me to Sobey's). I picked some up at the butcher this past week and was inspired by the latest Australian Gourmet Traveller and their spread on Spain. So I decided to make a Chorizo Soup (carrots, chicken, onions, fennel, tomatoes, romano beans, pasta, garlic, chorizo, chicken . . . stock).

Lacking stock, conveniently I had some chicken bones in the freezer. It was fairly late - I was crying for a relaxing hot bath (I have a bath gene and it was minus something stupid outside), so I threw the bones into a dutch oven, filled it with water, cranked the jet to a medium heat and headed upstairs.

When I was ready to start prepping dinner forty-five minutes later I started with my "stock"! Now, with the utmost respect to my friend Thomas, my stock looked and smelled pretty darn flavourful. But then it had the clarity of my windshield, driving down the highway in freezing rain with no wiper fluid. Seriously!

In the words of Mr Keller, "covered with water, in a giant kettle and brought to the boil; mats of foam and scum (coagulated blood and protein and fat) would rise and be disgarded. You would never want to eat this stuff , this foul mat. Obviously then you want to remove it. You must always be skimming; continually removing what you don't want in the finished product."

But by the time I came downstairs, my faux, rapid-after-meeting-filled-hell-of-a-day-all-I-want-to-do-is-relax-in-a-hot-bath-with-a-beer stock, unskimmed as it was, had more flotsam in it than the Hudson River. With no cheese cloth in the house, I “MacGivered” an Alton-Brown quick fix and used a No 4 Melitta coffee filter to line the inside of a sieve to clarify my stock – after all I had to show it some respect!

And then I took all of the ingredients, cluged them together in a soup-sort-of-a-way (meaning onions and carrots first, then tomatoes, then fennel, chorizo etc…), let it simmer and served - topped with micro greens and some shaved goat cheese, of course.

In the words of my regular dining partner. . . it was okay!!

Holy Crap!! Okay??!! How can you take all those brilliant flavour-rich ingredients, put them together, shave goat cheese on top and end up with. . . okay??!!

Perhaps, the regular pattern of Kelleresque meals around this household is breading a little bit of complacency in the staff!

. . . or maybe it’s the flotsam that seeped into the stock.