Rocket Bomber

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One important part of the holiday is the opportunity to take time off from the usual weekly grind.

Tonight, we’re taking a little time off from the Feast as we recognize that fact. In my call for participation I had set aside Sunday for “quiet and reflection” but it would seem we are just a skosh ahead of schedule on this front.

For those who have submitted links to tonight’s roundup: please bear with us for just a bit longer – There will be a link round-up post tomorrow. And thank you.

For those of you who are wondering if you missed the Thankful Manga Feast: Quite happily, the answer to your question is No! Plenty of time left to contribute: not only will there be a link round-up tomorrow, I also plan a post for “leftovers” on Monday.

After all: it’s not Thanksgiving without leftovers.

Do not mistake the brevity of this recap as some sort of slight on our contributors: the fault is mine. I don’t have quite the time to embelish or embroider this post [or contribute my own essay today] but these submissions should be given full consideration despite my cursory links:

• Lori Henderson at Manga Xanadu presents a testimonial: “So I guess the first one I am thankful for is Comic Quest, who always had, and still does have, a good selection of manga.” [more thanks at the link]
• at Experiments in Manga submits a personal expression of thanks, “Random Musings: A Note of Thanks for Wandering Son”
• And animemiz gifts us with a second submission: Hide and Seek… A Manga I am Grateful for…

Tomorrow’s seed topic, should you need one, is recycled from today: “I can’t believe they licensed this but am I ever thankful they did”

Once again: send your links to matt[at]rocketbomber.com or tweet them to me @ProfessorBlind

For our ‘main course’ today , we had a few more submissions, for which I am most thankful:

• Justin at The Organization of Anti-Social Geniuses presents Happy Thanksgiving: This Genius Tells You 10 Manga He’s Thankful For
• Tony Yao at Manga Therapy presents a slightly-subversive but precisely on topic “Manga I’m Thankful For”
• Animemiz submits a A Moment of Being Thankful Post
• Aaron at Manga Energy has a second submission, Thank You For Existing: An Appreciation of Some Manga Characters

And before I leave you, two special posts:

• A Thanksgiving Message from Manga Bookshelf where Melinda Beasi takes the time to thank all her readers and contributors. This was not submitted to me to be part of the MMF but the message is so heartfelt and so on-topic I just had to include it.
• And my own essay for today: Seldom Has So Much Been Owed by So Many to So Few

Tomorrow’s seed topic, should you need one, is the ‘side dish’ of our feast: “I can’t believe they licensed this but am I ever thankful they did”

Once again: send your links to matt[at]rocketbomber.com or tweet them to me @ProfessorBlind

[Assuming, of course, that my appropriation of the quote “Never was so much owed by so many to so few” does NOT start a flame war in the comments…]

Seldom has so much been owed by so many to so few. Manga is a niche market within a niche market; a very small part of the much larger funny-book business and one that not only doesn’t translate well to TV and cinema box office success – sometimes the manga doesn’t even translate well into English.

Even though I speak of the ‘few’ – I know, right now, that I’m going to miss someone you know, just as surely, is worthy of praise for exactly the same reasons I cite any of the academics, scholars, publishers, editors, and booksellers below. Please add them to the comments! Hell, the first one I’d add to any list is Simon Jones — Simon, we miss you, man. I know the past couple of years have been rough; I can only hope you are in fact still with us. — I respect his privacy, though, and I won’t dig. Here, I’m also specifically asking everyone else not to dig, either. [wishing you the best, though, Simon.]

Let me get several fundamental, essential, and entirely justified first thank yous out of the way, well, first:

To the thousands of original writers, artists, and creators: Thank you. To the millions of fans in many countries, but mostly in Japan: Thank you. To the dozens of publishers just trying to keep the whole business going in the respective countries of origin (but mostly in Japan): Thank you.

Arigatou Gozaimasu – ありがとうございます

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We can complain (Americans are always complaining about something) about only getting a few headliners and then the barest of table scraps when it comes to officially licensed and translated manga in English. Our ‘scraps’ consist of dozens of series and roughly 1,000 new manga volumes every year – an annual output that puts to shame most American graphic novel publishers, especially when we consider original graphic novels over the mere collections of previously published floppy comic monthlies recycling 30 and 40 and 80 year old characters.

I’m not knocking Marvel [Disney] and DC [Time Warner] — they have their business, the überniche segment of a niche market is ours — what I’m trying to say is I could spend $10,000 on manga this year and still not be able to buy every book that came out in 2012.

I think we can all agree that Manga, Our Chosen Hobby, isn’t where it was in 2006 and isn’t coming all-the-way-back any time soon — but there are still great books coming out every year.

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As noted, my list is incomplete, but here’s a few call-outs I feel are necessary:

Jim Killen is the best friend I have whom I’ve never met, never even spoken to – hell, I don’t even ‘know’ him online. He’s the graphic novel buyer in New York for my large bookstore chain, and that means he’s fed me new manga titles for over 11 years now. I’ve never even thanked him for it. Jim isn’t as well known as some others, but he still crops up now and then; for ICv2’s pre-NYCC industry panels, for example, or as a source of recommendations at Tor.com

Jim is fighting the good fight: we all know manga sales are not at historic highs, but he’s still working to get the best titles onto normal, mainstream displays in our stores, and at least every other year is championing some initiative to raise manga’s profile in store, where new customers can discover it. – Thanks, Jim.

Kurt Hassler, at one point, was Jim’s opposite number in the Borders chain, and I think we all can agree that Borders did manga Better. Borders gambled on substantially increased sales to teens and manga was certainly part of that initiative. Kurt, personally, drove much of that business while he was at Borders – and it was no surprise when Kurt partnered with Rich Johnson in 2006 to form Yen Press under Hachette. In my most recent Manga Bestseller Chart, Yen was responsible for 23% of the Top 500 manga volumes, not bad at all considering the market leader, VIZ, has nine different imprints and a backlist that goes back 20 years.

Thanks, Kurt. You’re aces in my book.

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Even before these two men were able to break manga into a stolid, moribund bookselling industry, someone had to introduce us to manga. I think an argument can be made that there were several someones (and that anime and video games also had a substantial role to play) but there are some names that immediately spring to mind:

Fred Schodt, among other accomplishments, wrote Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics in 1983 – a book so significant it gets its own wikipedia entry [“this article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it” — really, guys? we can fix that, at least]

Fred, I don’t know if there would be any manga at all — at least as we currently know it — if you hadn’t written this book and staked out an academic homestead for manga. Adaptations would have been even less sensitive to cultural differences and abusive of the original material; we need look no further than Tokyopop’s treatment of the Battle Royale manga for a cautionary tale of what the whole industry might have become. Fred: Thank You.

Carl Horn is the mysterious Kaiser Soze of manga, as near as I can tell: he leaves no concrete traces I can link to but his fingerprints are on everything: He is an editor at Dark Horse but also listed as staff on Viz’s Banana Fish – his name is spoken reverently in manga circles (his sense of humor, and skill in writing translation notes, is particularly cited) but the man is a specter; leaving no wikipedia page, no CV on linkedin, no personal blog. Past the occasional editorial that posts to Dark Horse’s web site (or convention appearance) we might be forgiven if we thought Carl a collective figment of manga fandom. No matter who or what you are Carl: Thank You.

Way back in the darkest of dark ages, like, the 1970s, Seiji Horibuchi was doing the reverse-otaku thing: he moved from Japan to California – and after a couple of years, started exporting American culture back to Japan. After six or seven years of that, however, Seiji noticed that there was no lack of hucksters trying to sell Americana to the Japanese, but there was a significant dearth of culture going the other way. By 1986 he had made some connections with Japanese Manga publishers that eventually became Viz Media.

I don’t know if it was because of deep backing from Japanese sponsors, sheer will, a little luck, or just the combination of all three with a grim determination to publish manga: but now Viz is the clear leader in American Manga publishing, and their efforts have and continue to open up the market: finding new fans every year. Even in the absence of their magazines (Shonen Jump, Shojo Beat, and Pulp) they have built on a few key brands and are currently also attempting to leverage those titles into a full-on-digital-Viz future.

I personally hate the Shonen-Jump-Manga-Industrial-Complex for how it warps the market: but I can see the obvious benefits – and hell, some of the stories are really good. Seiji: Thank You.

Helen McCarthy is a author, publisher, academic, crafter, and fan. She’s on Twitter, too. Thank you, Helen: you are a role model for the rest of us.

Hideki ‘Henry’ Goto is the former American head of Pioneer/Geneon [now, sadly defunct] but also currently president of Aniplex of American – doing the same job for a new company. I don’t know how long you have been buying anime, but Henry Goto was once a constant – his name was on every damn good anime release for years: from Trigun to Read or Die, and on some amazing US Rondo Robe releases besides. THANK YOU HENRY.

I hate Stu Levy. But here, in this context, considering all he did: I also have to thank Stu Levy.

I’m sort of ambivilent to Carl Macek. I’m pretty sure we would never have seen Robotech without him, though, so also – in this context: I have to thank Carl Macek.

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There are three RELENTLESS MARKETERS of MANGA that I know, that I would also like to thank:

First is Dallas Middaugh, who in 2010 had the most difficult job in Manga – when Kodansha took over Del Rey’s Manga imprint by fiat – He’s still on the job, though, working hard no matter which company is listed on the spine of the books. Thank you, Dallas.

Jason Thompson wrote the book on Manga; at least, the only book to date that isn’t just an overview but an honest-to-goodness catalog at least up through 2007. This is an excercise that I feel should be ongoing, continually updated, possibly a wiki: but I’m glad it saw print at least once. For this, and your writing since, Thank You, Jason.

Last but by no means least is Ed. When I think RELENTLESS MARKETER of MANGA no one else comes to mind as readily as Ed Chavez, who tweets both personally and professionally about manga, and is the marketing director and public face of Vertical Inc besides.

I want to be you when I grow up. Thank you, Ed.

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There are so many others I need to thank, but time and space is limited. [Please add them to the comments! with appropriate links, if you can provide them.] Since the opportunities are so rare to stop and reflect: let’s all take a moment to think of who has shaped our hobby, and thank them.

Since we’ve only five days, and since a large chunk this go-around is going to be taken up by travel and activities related to the [US] holiday, I expect this Manga Moveable Feast to be a smaller, more collegial affair.

Friends and Family, I guess we could say: welcome, internet manga family, to A Thankful Manga Feast.

The introductory post that announced the MMF last week has some details you might want to review — I included some idea-starters and topic suggestions should you feel stumped about what to write and needed (or wanted) one. This week we’re writing about manga we’re thankful for [and creators, and publishers, and professionals, and others to whom we are thankful]. I’ll be accepting submissions through Sunday: if you have links please send them to me either at matt[at]rocketbomber.com or via my twitter, @ProfessorBlind.

If you would like to write something, but don’t have webspace or a blog: please contact me as well: I can easily post your essays or reveiws here on RocketBomber.

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For our Appetizer course we have a few select delicacies:

From Aaron at Manga Energy, the first of his submissions to the feast: Manga Thanks

“After 12 volumes this series is a revelation from the moral ambiguity, the attention to little details it it’s own self-contained world. … a series that shows Manga’s potential not only as a story telling medium but also as a visual medium from the tense two page fight sequences questions about the ethics of espionage.”

From Izandra at Reading is Delicious — how very apt. :) — we have MMF Thanksgiving Edition: Appetizers Wednesday which actually covers my seed-topic for today: The Manga My Best Friend Lent Me That Got Me Into Manga

“She introduced me to Fushigi Yuugi and it was amazing–ok, it’s not so amazing now, but back then it was a revelation. Who knew that animated men could be so dreamy?” [editor’s note: pull quote not representative of the whole essay ;) ]

There is also my Daily Diary post for today, which outlines my own Voyage of Manga Discovery — I’m glad I wrote mine before I read Izandra’s (ours are similar).

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Tomorrow’s seed topic is the rather generic “Manga I’m Thankful For” –- but as is appropriate, this is also the meat of the feast: our main course. I’ll be glad to link to any and all Thankful posts, though: covering any suggested topic or even going off the rails a bit. [You might notice in the course of this MMF that I am the first and most egregious offender in that regard.]

In a way, my current hobby is very closely tied to my current employment, as a bookseller.

I’ve always liked anime, even before I knew where it came from or could put into words why I liked anime better than other cartoons on television. I watched Star Blazers, Voltron, G-Force, and Robotech as a kid; I remember Speed Racer’s run on late-night MTV, as a college student I watched anime on the Scifi Channel – because I watched a lot of Scifi Channel back then.

I was primed; not a fan in a sense we would recognize today (i.e. otaku) and certainly not rabid, but familiar enough. I had seen what dribs and drabs were getting localized for the American market, if not during its first run then in re-runs.

Two things changed in 2001. First, I got a regular job. I had worked more-or-less full time while in school (especially if you count my job as an RA with campus housing) and had managed to piece together work as a freelancer and ‘consultant’ after leaving college, but in 2001 I took a part-time job at the bookstore just to have some steady income I could count on. Within three months the bookstore offered me a full-time job with benefits, and even though it was retail I jumped on it. (I was tired of irregular checks and having to pay my own social security taxes out of my own meagre pocket, among other things)

The second thing that happened in 2001 was Adult Swim on Cartoon Network. Specifically Cowboy Bebop on Adult Swim on Cartoon Network. With that as a new catalyst, my inner fanboy started to grow again, and grow up. Suddenly I knew there was this thing called anime and I wanted more of it.

I discovered websites like Anime on DVD. I remember scouring every local Blockbuster just to find the few anime DVDs available to rent. Then I discovered Netflix. (Actually, Netflix started years before, and it would be 2002 before I signed up, but a friend of mine who noticed I rented anime from Blockbuster mentioned there was a website that rented movies that had foreign films and “your Japanamation cartoon stuff, too”.)

Before I bought my first manga, I was renting dozens of discs a month and watching everything — yes, I’m sure we all remember what kind of crap was coming out — but also remember that I was working at a bookstore. Bookstores in the early aughts were just beginning to ramp up their manga offerings. The first manga I remember seeing actually was Dragon Ball, since even before we added Manga as a shelving category, some of the books were coming in piecemeal — and having seen Dragon Ball Z I recognized the name.

I know the exact date when I bought my First Manga, though: It was Friday, October 3rd in 2003. It was the first volume of Planetes. At the time I was quite content to watch anime and would have described myself as an ‘anime fan’ — This book was compelling, though. The cover said: buy me.

I know the exact date because I was working in our back room at the time and I literally took this out of the box and decided to buy it before it even hit the shelf. I know it was a Friday because I got paid on Fridays and nearly always bought books; I know it was October 3rd because (as I would later discover) we always got manga early at my bookstore, before the ‘official’ release date on Tuesdays.

The discovery of manga also led me back to a discovery of comics as a visual medium. I eventually made my way to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and started thinking a bit more deeply about art and storytelling, and not just boobs and action scenes. Eventually this led to a semi-regular writing gig at a friend’s site [the now-defunct ComicSnob] and that led to my current part-time career as a blogger and data-analyst.

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Wednesday is the Appetizers course for this Manga Moveable Feast, and the seed-topic I offered was “The Manga My Best Friend Lent Me That Got Me Into Manga” –

For me, it was more of a process than a single event: a lot of ground work and familiarity with stuff like old-school anime, Pokemon, Super Mario, and Toonami, juiced by the sudden appearance of anime that followed on DVD, and set to incubate in a big-box bookstore where we were just beginning to stock up for the Manga Boom of the aughts. A perfect storm setup for turning a scifi-geek, math-dork, and general-purpose-nerd into an full blown manga otaku.

My ‘friend’ that got me into manga was my bookstore. I would like to offer my most sincere thanks, especially as that ‘friend’ still provides me with an income, a privileged spot atop our massive distribution chain, access to an amazing book database maintained for me by a corporate office in New York, and a very decent employee discount aside.

If I weren’t a bookseller, I would still be a fan – but I would be watching anime on DVD. I don’t know if I would have made the jump sideways into manga, or if I would be quite so obsessive about owning each-and-every-version of a property I love (like the Crest of the Stars novels, or Mori’s Emma, or as much Aqua/Aria as has been made available in English, or the 27-volume box set of Fullmetal Alchemist manga)

If I weren’t a bookseller, I might still be posting bar reviews and bad fiction to my own small blog on an out-of-the-way corner of the internet, rather than the grand experiments I keep attempting now. I wouldn’t be compiling my own manga bestseller lists and scheming how to make a living at book-sales-data analysis. I wouldn’t know all of the TRULY AMAZING PEOPLE I have met who are also manga fans and bloggers. I wouldn’t be a participant in the Manga Moveable Feast.

There are a lot of people in the industry I need to thank, not just the sci-fi and graphic novel buyer who decided to place manga in our stores — in fact, that long-list of “thank yous” is going to be my next post.

But today, as we get this Thankful Manga Feast started I’d like to thank all of you: my friends, if I can claim you all. I am particularly grateful to the community for sticking with me even as my own participation ebbed and waned (mostly waned) and my focus and engagement with manga, shifted, and started taking me to weird places.

I wish I could remember everyone and thank you all. David, thank you for hosting the first MMF. Melinda, thanks for giving some of my projects a new home. Erica, Brigid, Johanna: thank you for being my role models – I wish I could blog (and write, and think and analyze) more like you do. Ed, thanks for having me on the podcast. ALL YOU FABULOUS TWITTER FOLKS, thank you for putting up with me talking about everything and anything but manga (it’s almost comical how little I mention my favorite hobby).

If I didn’t namecheck you, please please don’t feel slighted – I have limited time and space :)
But I value all the interactions I have with every fellow fan on the internet, as it can be kind of lonely being the only fan at work, or in your peer group. I love that we have the MMF, and that you are now my peer group, and [hopefully] my friends.

Many of our readers (and most potential participants in November’s Manga Moveable Feast) will be celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday on November 22nd. In years past, we’ve come to a consensus to either schedule around the holiday or skip the month altogether; however, following a suggestion by Justin on the email list/discussion forum a topic was presented that was a natural fit for the holiday:

“Well, it technically is around Thanksgiving, so… maybe manga that we are thankful we can read? Thankfully exists in print or something? Of course, that’s pretty vague, and I believe the topic is limited to artist, manga, or genre, but just throwing it out there.”

Thank you, Justin.

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A Thankful Manga Feast
Wednesday 21 November to Sunday 25 November

The usual modus operandi for the MMF is to consider a single work, single creator, or (less frequently) a genre or imprint worthy of note; at any rate there is either a single topic or a very strong theme upon which our small-but-mighty community focuses. This month is, different.

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Stop. Breathe. Think.

Let’s take some time to reflect: to ask what brought us into the hobby, and what keeps us here.

Let’s take a moment to thank everyone, from creators to publishers, licensors and licensees, the friends who loaned us our first manga and the brave souls who trawl the Japanese internets to inform us of our next one. Let’s be thankful that we were able to read some really excellent manga, and give credit where due.

Our topic is effectively open-ended. I look forward to reading all your submissions.

Once again, our hub is http://www.rocketbomber.com/mmf — the Emma stuff is still there; if you’d like to link to the two separately than please cut-and-paste or bookmark http://www.rocketbomber.com/mmf#emma and http://www.rocketbomber.com/mmf#Thankful2012.

Over the course of the week [or is it just a super-long holiday weekend?] I’ll revive my MMF Daily Diary; if you like, you can also use these as seeds for your own reviews, essays, and thought-pieces

Appetizers Wednesday – “The Manga My Best Friend Lent Me That Got Me Into Manga” – be sure to thank them!
The Feast – “Manga I’m Thankful For” – Thursday
A Side Dish – “I can’t believe they licensed this but am I ever thankful they did” – Friday
Desserts – “Guilty Pleasures Manga” – Saturday
Quiet and Reflection – Sunday – also a chance to catch up with late posts, or an opportunity to write a longer piece about manga generally and not manga, title, specific.

I’ll post a final wrap-up on Monday the 26th. Because there are always last minute submissions. ;)

My actual topic for Wednesday will be more about my own discovery process – I suppose the ‘friend’ who got me into manga is a corporate buyer for the bookstore in New York – but I know so many of you who were converted to the cause by a friend, and I’d love to hear more testimonials.

If you have any additional suggestions for the Thanksgiving MMF, or any questions, comments, concerns, random insults, or other feedback: please drop them in the comments here, or track me down on twitter [at ProfessorBlind – I’m on twitter more than is healthy]. And starting on Wednesday, please send me the links to your submissions! Twitter is perfectly fine, but if you don’t tweet or want to be doubly-sure, email me at matt@rocketbomber.com so I can add you & your essay to the MMF archive.

And once again: special thanks to Justin for the idea.

oh, yeah: that subject line is total search bait – but look at these pics:

11 Days, two chickens, 10 quarts of chicken stock, six attempted recipes, numerous tweets & quite a few pictures, and of course the requisite ‘alien face hugger’ references –

Food blogging is *hard*.

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A crockpot makes chicken stock so easy I wonder why more people don’t try it. Of course, “stock” is one of those fancy-schmancy foodie words like artisinal, locavore, and arugula so maybe some are put off by the very name of the thing, and don’t attempt it. Maybe the idea of having to process a whole chicken is scary for those whose only interactions are with the sandwich, or perhaps with the boneless-skinless-types of chicken. Maybe the long cook time seems daunting, and home cooks balk at the perceived commitment.

Chicken stock is the easiest thing in the world — especially with a ready slow cooker on stand-by. But to say anything is ‘easy’ (in any context) depends on quite a bit of prior knowledge, practice, and familiarity — what I do as a matter of course might, to others, seem like alchemy.

So, to make chicken stock: take one chickens-worth of chicken bones and simmer with water and aromatics for a day, or so. Chicken stock is easy. Here:

Take 4 ribs of celery. Cut them in half (just enough to fit them in your crockpot)
2 carrots, washed, but don’t bother peeling them. Into the pot.
4 cloves of garlic. You have to peel them, but that’s it. Add them to the pot.
Half an onion. No, don’t dice it. It can go in whole.
One bay leaf, if you have it.

And chicken bones.

I’ll make this even easier – go buy a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. No, really, until you’ve turned KFC into a home cooked meal you’re going to think I’m joking: go buy a bucket of KFC (any recipe) and enjoy (hopefully not by yourself, and not all in one meal) but save the bones. You were going to throw them out; instead put them in a ziplock bag and freeze them. Do that again; one bucket of KFC might not be enough bones.

For everyone who just went “ew” – yeah, well, fast food can cause that reaction. Oh, I get it, “But people were eating that, gnawing on them, slobbering all over…” – yes. And I hope they enjoyed it. But here:

Bake the bones on a baking sheet in a 400° oven for a half hour: not only will this assuage any fears you might have about cooking table scraps, it opens up the bones and makes the water more effective as a solvent. After we add the bones and enough water to fill our crockpot within a half inch of the rim: we’re going to boil this for like, days – at least 12 hours at a low boil. You can add herbs, if you have them, and this will need some salt [season to taste] but those are the basics of stock: water, celery, carrot, garlic, onion, bones, heat, and time.

There are other ways to source chicken bones, of course. You can actually buy chicken necks & backs from some butcher shops quite inexpensively – after all the other useful parts are sold, these are about all that’s left. My preferred method is to buy a whole chicken, eat it, and save the bones and other odd bits to make stock – you can even cook the whole chicken in the crockpot, if you like, but stewed chicken tends to come out too dry; the long cooking time is not kind to breast meat. That, and dealing with a boiling hot, wet, dripping bird is asking for trouble.

One quick application for whole chicken is to either grill or broil it — the grill is preferred but the oven works just as well — and as shown in the pictures above, a chicken can be quickly and easily butterflied to shorten the overall cooking time and literally even out the difference between breast and thigh, meaning both will be done at the same time and with minimal finagling of either bird or fire.

My method for butterflied & roasted chicken is a barely-adapted version of Alton Brown’s: here’s an ‘official’ recipe posted to the Official website that no one will read and here’s the not-quite-official-or-legitimate youtube version we’re all going to watch:

I typically don’t get that fancy—at most I’ll rub the bird down with oil & then sprinkle some salt—but the basics are all there in the vid: how to prep the bird, and how to cook it. Alton immediately proceeds to a sauce — and I’m sure it’s tasty — but I’m more interested in the parts: Chicken, bones, grease, roasted veg.

The main advantage of the quick, hot broil is to de-fat the chicken: it drips out from under the skin and stays in the roasting pan. When I make stock from a bird cooked under the broiler, I never have to de-fat the resulting stock. (Since a slightly cloudy stock doesn’t matter to me either, I also don’t have to strain it through cheesecloth or anything fancy. I just fish the exhausted bones and veg out of the resultant stock with a wire spider)

After a half-hour rest on a baking sheet, your roasted bird will have cooled and is ready for a vulture-like picking over:

Remove and reserve both breasts [deboned], both thighs [deboned], and the meat from both chicken legs – deboned – have you caught up on the theme here? We’re removing all the succulent cooked meat from our bird in the largest chunks possible, and producing a small stack of ribs, cartilage, skin, and long bones for our stock. The backbone we snipped out and the neck (…both of which can be roasted with the bird; plenty of room in that pan) both join the picked-over carcass as they go into a slow cooker and we cook bones, celery, carrots, onions, and garlic on the low setting for 12 to 18 or even 24 hours. I also add the giblets; some folks balk at giblets, so your methods may vary. The wings are also Prime Additions to our stock, but I’ll forgive you if you eat them right out of the oven [save the bones!]

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So you’ve roasted the sacrificial bird. You’ve done as directed, and saved the carcass, and boiled it with herbs and saved the ceremonial broth:

Finished stock, once cooled, can be partitioned into plasticware and frozen. A 5qt. crockpot minus the solids will yield 3-4 quarts of stock; I like to freeze quart-sized containers for soups and other applications. What kinds of applications?

Well, if you get fancy and filter your stock so it’s clear, you can easily make eggdrop soup. You just need an egg or two, and some sliced green onion.

Gravies and sauces are also easy: stock or broth is often called for as an ingredient, and how nice would it be to have homemade on hand? No more cans or boxes — and you get to control the amount of salt that went into it.

Let me give you three soup “bases”, and some applications for each:

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A quick gravy

1 cup finely chopped onion
1 cup finely chopped mushrooms
optional garlic
2 tbs butter
2 tbs flour
1 cup chicken stock

1 can cream of mushroom soup*

1 cup reserved chicken*

In a skillet or saute pan: cook your mushrooms and onions in the butter over medium high heat until the onions are translucent and just starting to brown around the edges. Dust the flour over the top of your onion/mushroom mixture to form a quick roux; continue to cook over medium high heat until the flour just starts to brown (or at least long enough to cook the paste flavor out of it). Add a cup of stock and stir until the roux dissolves into a tasty sauce, and then add the cream of mushroom soup.

Now, that first asterisk* — you could double the amounts of mushrooms, start cooking the mushrooms a good five minutes in a dry skillet, or until they begin to give up liquid, add the onions and butter and cook as above, add another two tablespoons of butter, 4 total tablespoons of flour, cook into a roux, and then make a basic white sauce: some milk, some stock, a little garlic, plenty of time.

Do a recipe search for ‘bechamel’ and you’ll see where I’m going with that: you are of course forgiven if (like me) you take the red-and-white-labelled canned shortcut.

When I whipped up this quick gravy after roasting a chicken, I used the two thighs, diced, and stirred in. After a quick reduction to get to the right consistency, I served it on egg noodles for dinner. The next day I had chicken gravy over biscuits for lunch.

You could thin this out with even more chicken stock, to make a soup – but then, we had a can of cream of mushroom soup already, right? You could just throw some chicken in it. However, if you were going the long way ‘round and made your own bechamel, it might be kind of nice to go the distance and make your own cream of mushroom soup too.

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Cannellini & Orzo Soup

½ cup onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, crushed and minced
optional MORE GARLIC
optional ½ cup mushroom, diced – if you had some left over, say, from the gravy recipe above
optional tsp tomato paste – I have a tube of this in my fridge, so it’s easy to do small portions
optional strip of bacon, finely chopped
optional splash of soy sauce
1 can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
½ cup orzo pasta
2 quarts chicken stock

herbs if you have them: oregano, basil, parsley, a ½ tbs or so of each
Orzo is pasta cut to look like rice; you can of course use any pasta, but the shape and size of orzo goes well with the beans.

Let’s talk about all the options — First up: less is more. I tried to err on the side of hidden, subtle flavors. The idea is to go earthy and meaty, not full-on-smoky or salty or TOMATO. My most recent batches of chicken stock were made with roast chicken parts (especially the crispy, browned skin) and so came out a little bit browner, and tasting nice and roasty. I wanted to make a version of chicken noodle soup, while also accentuating that flavor of the stock.

In the bottom of the pan, I fried up one strip of bacon, very finely diced, with a little bit of chopped mushrooms until the bacon grease was rendered. To that I added the onion, cooked until translucent, and then mixed up a quick paste with just a bit of flour [a tsp. or less] and a tsp. of tomato paste. Once that came together, I added a splash of soy sauce and the beans, along with the garlic. I think I used four cloves of garlic in this one; your mileage may vary. I sort of tossed the beans around until they warmed up, then poured in the stock and brought it to a slow boil. After that, cook pasta as directed on the box, right in the soup.

It would be enough to make this with just onions, garlic, beans, and noodles — all my other additions could be skipped, or added singly, or in any combination. I just happened to have this on hand the night I was cooking.

It would also be possible to skip the pasta and add more beans, or to add spinach. Garnish with herbs, maybe also with a squeeze of fresh lemon.

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Chicken and Leeks

1 lb. leeks – see wikipedia if you’ve never heard of them before. Fresh leeks are a bit of a pain to clean, but manageable. I recently found frozen leeks—precut, ready to go—at Trader Joe’s.

1 half onion, Lyonnaise cut [see here]
Lots of garlic. Mmmm… garlic.
Butter. Lots of butter. Like, a half stick of butter.
2 tbs. flour

2 cups reserved chicken (or more)
Chicken stock

The easiest way to clean a leek is to cut it in half, lengthwise, and then run water down the middle to get the dirt out. In a way, it’s no worse than celery, but like celery the dirt really gets down in there so you have to take it apart to clean it properly.

Slice your leeks into ½in half-rings. Cook leeks, onions, garlic and butter in a skillet on medium heat until the leeks wilt and the onions are translucent. Dust the flour over the top and stir to combine, then loosen the mixture up with chicken stock, maybe just a cup to start.

Now, you have a choice: if this is going to be an entre, reduce slightly into a sauce, then serve over chicken torn into strips on a bed of egg noodles, pasta, or rice. Or even mashed potatoes: this would be awesome on mashed potatoes.

If we’re going to make Chicken & Leek Soup, we’ll want to use a little less chicken and a whole lot more stock — maybe even 3-4 quarts since we started with a pound of leeks. The great thing is you don’t have decide right away: The leek&onion mixture does fine in the fridge, so you could have a dinner one night and make soup (less soup) with the leftovers.

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These ideas are just the beginning. You could take a handful of frozen peas & carrots, a tiny bit of leftover chicken, this lovely homemade stock and make ramen noodles with it. Yes, that same brick that costs 17¢ — just use an actual soup base instead of the nasty little packet. Add a splash of soy if you miss the ‘ramen’ flavor. Stock is also a base for things like chicken pot pie, some chowders, and of course, chicken and dumplings. You can use chicken stock instead of water or milk in mashed potatoes [mmmm… for my next chicken & leek dinner, that’s what I’m doing], use it to make pan sauces for quick sauted meals, or even put boring noodles in it.

SO my last “Rethinking the Box” column was, in fact, my Last “rethinking the box” column.

I think I’ve done as much damage there as I can. In looking at the origin of the Big Box Bookstore and then taking it to fairly exotic places, I’d say my infatuation with the Box is done.

In future essays, I’d like to focus more on bookselling and less on 4-walls-and-a-cafe. The business of books has already moved forward a whole century in just the last 10 years, and we have even more growth and adaptation ahead of us.

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All essays of course remain for you to re-read (or newly discover), indexed on my Bookselling Resources page [http://www.rocketbomber.com/bookselling] and the new set of long-form-thought-pieces will be added there as well. This isn’t so much an abandonment of principles as a change in focus and required mental readjustment.