Stock

You make stock on a Sunday because it's the one thing you can't rush and Sunday's the one day you don't have to. The carcass is from Friday's chicken. You wrapped it, put it in the fridge, told yourself you'd do it Saturday, didn't. That's fine. That's what Sunday's for. The biggest pot. The carcass goes in, and whatever bones you've been keeping in the freezer in a bag with no label. An onion, halved, skin on, because the skin's where the colour is. Two carrots you weren't going to eat anyway. The celery that's gone bendy. Peppercorns, a bay leaf, the parsley stalks you saved when you used the leaves. Cold water to cover. Cold, not hot; you were told this once by someone who knew, and you've never questioned it. Then the wait. It comes up slowly. You're supposed to skim the grey stuff off the top when it starts, so you stand there with a spoon and skim, and it's oddly satisfying, like clearing a windscreen. Then you turn it down to the smallest flame the hob will do, the one that's barely a flame at all, and you put the lid on at an angle, and you leave it. Three hours. Four. The flat starts to smell like something's happening. You read. You do the thing on the laptop you've been avoiding. You go and look at it, for no reason; it's the same as it was. A bubble comes up every few seconds like the pot's thinking. At some point you're on the phone to your mum and she asks what you're up to and you say "making stock" and she says "oh, good," in the tone she'd use if you'd said you'd been to church. You strain it through a sieve into the second-biggest pot. The bones go in the bin, spent, pale. What's left is gold and clear and tastes of nothing much on its own, which is the point; it tastes of everything you'll put it in later. It cools. You pour it into old yoghurt pots and label them this time, with the date, and stack them in the freezer where the unlabelled bag was. Nothing's happened today. You've made a base for things. You'll find out in February what it was for.