Weekend Miscellaney: Crown Hill, Chicken Stock, and Cranberries

**Who knew you could rent the Gothic Chapel at Crown Hill Cemetery for parties? I didn't. But kudos to a dear friend who skipped the traditional wedding rehearsal dinner on Friday night and threw a Halloween costume bash as a welcome party for the out-of-town wedding guests. The Gothic Chapel is beautiful on its own, but on Halloween? It's a perfect setting for mayhem. Plus that part of the cemetery with its monuments and mausoleums is very "Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer." A perfectly wonderful, scary idea.

**On Friday, I made enough stock to get me through the next couple of months. Ruhlman and others have recently done lengthy posts about how much better house made stock is that the vaguely chicken-flavored water that comes in cans or boxes, but I wasn't sold until I started using it for every day cooking, but what a difference an actual chicken makes. (Plus, by my calculation, one batch yields me about $12 worth of the store-bought stuff. Not bad when a chicken pays for itself.)

**Made and processed a dozen jars of various treats yesterday including my favorite cranberry, sour cherry, grapefruit chutney. There is nothing like the smell of fresh cardamom when it comes right out of the spice grinder. Plus, since I learned to supreme grapefruit instead of peeling the old-school way, this dish is much easier. Sweet, spicy, and tangy. Just the way a good cranberry sauce should be! Plus my workhorse of an old LC stockpot continues to see me through.