Hey Dan,

While you’re living high on the hog, I’m getting back to basics. After all the travel there’s a serious need to lose some weight, so the exercise has been ramped up, and the calories consumed reduced.

One favourite for the weight-loss diet is soup. It sates an appetite and can be healthy too, depending on the ingredients. Tonight it’s pea soup with mint, so that checks all the boxes.

But first, I need some stock.

A long, long time ago I gave up on store-bought stock or cubes. Convenient they may be, but typically an ingredient list looks like this: Wheat flour, salt, flavour enhancers (monosodium glutamate, disodium 5′-ribonucleotides), yeast extract, glucose syrup solids, chicken fat, potato starch, sugar, chicken extract, flavouring (contains celery), onion extract, colour (ammonia caramel). That’s from Oxo, but may as well be any of them.

So that’s flour, salt, sugar, fat and chemicals. Mmmmm, ammonia caramel: Just like Grandma used to make.

Really, I have no interest in eating something that sounds as though it was scraped off a vessel in a toilet cleaner factory.

So today’s stock day. Easy: A couple of chicken carcasses; some old chook bones saved from other meals and frozen; some celery; an onion; a couple of carrots; a few bay leaves; salt and pepper; water. Simmer for a few hours, skim, strain (remembering you’re reserving the liquid and not the solids – I absent-mindedly tipped the stock down the sink one day. Doh!).

Viola: chicken stock. No artificial ingredients, loads of flavour, and it costs a couple of dollars. I divide it into Ziplock bags in two-cup portions and freeze them, and one pot of stock lasts me for a month or two for soups or risottos or whatever.

There’s only one problem. While it’s simmering, the whole house fills with a superb chicken/bay leaf aroma and it is mouth-watering. It takes some serious self-restraint not to raid the fridge, and that would defeat the purpose somewhat.