Maybe you read my previous post about how I freeze leftovers, or maybe you didn’t.

Obviously, I think you probably should read every word that I’ve written, but I can hardly be called an impartial judge.

Regardless, I made a nice pot of beef broth in my Crock-Pot the other day.

After leaving it to simmer overnight, I put it out on my snowy kitchen balcony to cool, finally freezing it into useful, recipe-ready pucks using my silicone muffin pan.

Would you believe that a stinkbug made its way into my fridge on the cooling glass mixing bowl full of stock? It was drawn by the heat, no doubt. Thankfully, I’d covered the bowl with Saran Wrap, creating a wisp of perma-garbage, but also keeping the insect on the exterior. Insect bits are almost never Kosher, by the by.

Winter weather in recent days has left me a bit less than dexterous. My arthritis definitely waxes and wanes with something, whether that’s barometric pressure or my star chart. At any rate, I fumbled a little as I used my customary tongs to prize the icy soup circles out of their silicone enclosure.

Touching that chilly stuff is gross—because there’s a dead animal in there!—and also bitterly cold and painful for already aching finger joints. The tongs are useful, but approaching a necessary evil when wielded by hands I’d call ham-fisted if I hadn’t renounced pork decades ago.

I store my home-made chicken and beef stock in a plastic tub in the top, right corner of my freezer. Within that container, I subdivide the two types in a few labeled Ziploc bags that I rinse periodically and re-use for that same purpose.

Slipping the last few pucks into their baggie, I was struck by this thought:

“My gosh, I’m participating in a stock manipulation!”

I think that’s probably all I need to say about that, short of admitting I wish I’d had a copy of my kids’ Game Informer magazine (a GameStop publication) to shove position artfully in the background of my photo for this piece.

Ahem.

♦