USE WATER.

Some morning cooking advice from Michael Ruhlman:

I cannot say this strongly or loudly enough: DO NOT use canned stock/broth. Use WATER instead. I repeat. You DO NOT NEED to buy that crappy can of Swanson’s low sodium chicken broth! It will HURT your food. Use water instead. When that recipe says 1 cup of fresh chicken stock (or good quality canned broth), please know that your food, 90 percent of the time, will taste better if you use tap water instead of that "good quality" canned broth. Water is a miracle.Last time I was doing a recipe for a book with one of the most lauded chefs in the country—he said to the recipe developer/writer, yes, ok to use canned if you don’t have fresh. I said, “Really?” He said, “yes.” I said, “When was the last time you used canned stock?” When he didn’t respond, I said, “Have you tasted canned stock?” He said he hadn’t that he could recall.I repeat: your food will taste better and fresher if you use that wonderful and inexpensive fluid at the end of your tap rather than anything that you can buy in a can or a box.

That's certainly proven true in everything I've ever made, up to and including Chinese food. Canned broth tastes fairly terrible. Water, and a liberal sprinkling of a coarse salt, will almost always prove superior. On a related note, Mark Bittman has a column on late-summer soups, all of which use water. And if you want to make your own stock, click on the Ruhlman link and he'll tell you how.