One thing I make a lot of in the fall and winter is Risotto.  I’d like to tell you I make my own stock for my Risotto and all my other cooking needs.  But truth be told I just don’t have the time. The result is that I use canned chicken stock.  I’ve used canned broth for years and generally am happy with it except that it takes a lot of room in my pantry and I almost always have some leftovers since the cans hold two cups.  Usually I’ll freeze the leftovers but then I end up with bunches of frozen stock because I forget to use them.  Earlier this year, I got some samples of Savory Choice chicken broth concentrate at the Fancy Food show.  But once the garden started producing I didn’t get around to using them.  With my recent cooking frenzy and pantry raiding, I found the samples and gave them a try.  They come in little pouches – you squeeze out the concentrate and mix it with water.  As usual I was skeptical, how could something I needed to reconstitute taste good?  While they were liquid my mind immediately went to those horrid highly salty chicken bouillon cubes.  My fears were unfounded though because these actually taste really good!  Better yet, I have found they are super convenient since each package makes 1 cup of broth so I don’t have leftover broth anymore and since the packages are small they don’t take up much pantry space.  I do believe I’m a convert! 

Project Foodie loves our foodies as much as we love cookbooks so what better way to show our appreciation than to have a cookbook give-away contest?  Each week for the next few weeks we will randomly draw a foodie to win a cookbook!  We’ll announce the cookbook to be given away each Wednesday on the Project Foodie frontpage along with the previous week’s winner.  See the details for this week’s contest here.

Cooking involves a plethora of terms, techniques and ingredients.  Some are very familiar to the everyday chef while others can be baffling if they have not been seen before.   Here at Project Foodie we want to help eliminate that confusion and make cooking more enjoyable for both novices and veterans alike.  We're doing this through our interactive Glossary and accompanying series of articles called "Language of the Kitchen".  The article series will explore and define various cooking terms and techniques.  The glossary will provide easy access to all of these definitions plus definitions by chefs, cookbook authors, and you the foodies!  

The glossary is a fun interactive way to express your culinary knowledge while helping others learn more about The Language of the Kitchen.  If you've got some Kitchen Language you want to share go to the Glossary and enter your terms or update existing ones.  It's a great way to enhance the learning experience for foodies.

If you want to learn more about the Language of the Kitchen then go see what Foodie Karen has to say about one of the essential components of cooking - Heat - in our first edition of "The Language of the Kitchen".