Psssst! Here's a stock tip for you: Make your own.
Hot turkey sandwiches aren't the only option for Thanksgiving leftovers. Break up that turkey carcass, add some aromatic vegetables and perhaps a couple of uncooked chicken wings, cover with cold water and simmer.
In a couple of hours, you will have what cookbook author Lauren Groveman calls "liquid gold," a rich, deeply flavored poultry stock that can enhance the flavor of everything from rice and vegetables to homemade soups and rich sauces.
"I never use water alone to simmer anything, because I always have broth in my freezer," said Groveman, author of The I Love to Cook Book, in which she advocates for freezers and pantries well stocked with homemade ingredients.
Thanksgiving happens every Sunday in her house, where she cooks a turkey breast for a week's worth of sandwiches and then uses the bones to make quarts of stock, which she freezes in 2-cup portions for use any time.
"One of the problems with holiday cooking is that people limit the goodness associated with it and that's such a shame," she said.
Nigella Lawson, in How to Eat, confesses to scavenging for bones - even off the plates of others - and freezing them, along with carrot tops, celery hearts or other fresh vegetable scraps, so that she can pull them out on the odd Sunday afternoon to make stock.
"An actual recipe for stock would be hard to give with a straight face," she writes. "Boiling remains to make stock is as far from being a precise art as you can get."
But Christopher Kimball, host of America's Test Kitchen and editor of Cook's Illustrated magazine, laughs when you mention homemade stock.
"I have bags of vegetables and bones in the back of my freezer, and I find them months later. I have all these good intentions, but for 95 percent of what I do, I use canned chicken stock."
Kimball says the best stocks are made with fresh meat. "The best thing to use is ground chicken. The meat has the flavor, not the bones," he said.
The notion of making stock from scraps is a relic of a different time, he said. "Our grandmothers were being frugal because they had to be."
For some cooks, the notion of using boxed stock or canned stock or the bouillon cube is one more step away from an elemental part of cooking. The French call stocks fonds de cuisine, essential foundations of cooking.
Stock isn't something you make, says Ruth Reichl in The Gourmet Cookbook. "It is something you do."
