10 Things Chinese Grandmothers Never Waste

10 Things Chinese Grandmothers Never Waste 📖 Get Make It Go Further — the habits from my mother's kitchen, written down for an American grocery store (244 pages, 46 dinners): https://mrsjinkitchen.com 🥢 Subscribe for a new kitchen habit every week — ordinary groceries, better dinners. Chicken bone soup, my mother's way, and the seven things she never threw away: bones, fat, stems, cold rice, green onion roots. If your Sunday ends with a heavy trash bag, it is not you. Nobody showed you that food has two lives. In my mother's house nothing left the kitchen until it had been used twice. Every measure she never wrote down is below. Hao ma? 🍚 THE CLOCK 10 minutes hands-on, about 2 hours of the pot whispering on its own. Sunday afternoon, after the chicken is eaten. 🍚 THE CARD: MY MOTHER'S CHICKEN BONE SOUP Makes about 8 cups. Bones and carcass of 1 whole cooked chicken, about 1 lb (450 g) (the soup lives in the bones, not the meat) 10 cups (2.4 L) cold water 3 slices fresh ginger, about 1 inch total (the taste of home in every Chinese soup) Green tops of 3 green onions (the white roots stay in the glass on the windowsill) 1 tsp salt, added at the END (salt at the start tightens the bones and flattens the soup) Optional: 1 tsp rice vinegar (pulls more out of the bones) Put the bones and cold water in a large pot. Bring to a simmer over high heat, about 10 minutes. When the first gray foam rises, skim it off for 2 to 3 minutes. Turn the heat to the lowest it will go. Add the ginger, the onion tops and the vinegar if using. Lid on with a small crack. Let it barely move, never a hard boil, for 2 hours. Three if you have it. Strain into a bowl. Stir in the salt now, not before. Cool, then refrigerate overnight. Lift the fat off the top into a small jar. That is your cooking fat for the week. Cook rice in the soup instead of water: same measure, same method. 🍚 I WILL NOT ARGUE Vinegar or not. A clove of garlic or not. Pull the meat off before the pot, or pick it after. Serve plain with green onion, or use it as the water for rice or noodles. 🍚 THE PAN IS HONEST Cloudy, gray soup → it boiled hard. Flat taste → salt went in with the bones. Mushy fried rice → the rice was still warm. Woody broccoli stems → the tough outside was not peeled. Slimy green onions on the sill → the water was never changed. Dry, stringy meat → it stayed in the pot with the bones. Fat on top of the cold soup → the cook's reward. 🍚 ONE QUIET THING ABOUT THE STORE A whole chicken is about $8. The same bird in pieces is about $15, and the bones are gone. A carton of broth is about $3, and those bones would have made two. Nobody is cheating you. Cutting and wrapping is work. 🍚 THE HABIT Bones in the pot on Sunday night. Soup keeps 4 days in the refrigerator door, 3 months in the freezer in jars or flat bags. Whole ginger lives in the freezer and grates frozen. Green onion roots stand in a glass of water on the sill, water changed every 2 days, regrown for months. Green onions never go in the freezer; they turn to slime. 🍚 WHAT I WOULD ASK OF YOU Carry two things: the bones in the pot, and the green onions in the glass. Then tell me if your kitchen smelled like Sunday, what honestly went in the bag this week, and your state. 🍚 NEXT TIME IN THIS KITCHEN Rice cooked in that chicken soup instead of water. A different rice. #chinesecookingrecipe #homecooking #nowaste