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In the past I've always felt very much demotivated when HWMBO goes off to Singapore to visit his family for Chinese New Year. I don't want to cook, I spend too much time online, I go to bed late, I wake up early, all that and more. So this year I decided that perhaps I'd at least remedy the "no cooking" part of this.

I saw a bag of dried black-eyed peas in Tescos, and thought to myself: Bean Soup. I got some other things, and this morning, right after breakfast, I put it together. At around 1:30 PM, it looked like this.



It smells heavenly, but I'm going to let it mature overnight and have some for lunch tomorrow. In the fridge some of the grease that's left will solidify at the top and I'll be able to skim that off. Here's my recipe.



You can put any sort of bean into this soup, but it's probably best to have a small pea bean type such as navy beans, black-eyed peas, or the like. Kidney beans would be too big and overpowering. Wash the beans and soak them overnight. Then drain and rinse them, put them in a pot, cover with cold water, bring to the boil and boil for 10 minutes. Then turn the heat down to simmer and keep them going for 1/2 hour. This is very important, as raw beans are poisonous, as well as being pretty difficult to eat. Then drain and rinse them yet again. They will now be fit to use in your soup. Set them aside in a colander until needed.

I used a whole head of garlic, peeled and chopped. That's because I like garlic and the bacon flavour would probably overpower it.

Then chop 1 bell pepper, 1 medium onion, and a few stalks of celery. Put all this in a bowl and put aside for the moment.

Now take one package of smoked bacon lardons and one package of smoked back bacon, cut into smallish squares. Put some olive oil in the pot and when it's nice and hot dump in the lardons and bacon, stirring well until they're a bit brown. Add the garlic, let it mix for around a minute, then dump in the vegetables. At this point turn the heat down just a bit, cover the pot, and sauté everything for 5-7 minutes.

While they're sautéing, get two Knorr's Ham cubes and crush them in a measuring cup, then add boiling water to maybe 3/4 of the way up the cup. Once the vegetables are tender, add the beans and pour the ham stock you just made over them, adding additional water if required. You probably won't need additional salt, but grind some pepper in it and add some thyme, maybe 1/4 teaspoonful. Bring it to the boil for 5 minutes or so, and skim whatever scum rises to the surface. Then turn down the heat to a simmer and cover the pot. Simmer for a couple of hours. Taste and correct the seasoning if required.

I tried a little bit, and it tastes really good. Be careful of added salt, as ths stock cubes are plenty salty enough for this soup. I'm going to have it with a small salad and a stick of French bread. The amount I've made will probably last for quite a while so I may freeze some for enjoyment later. If HWMBO is very lucky, I might have some left when he gets back.

I have found that I am less and less likely to buy and read cookbooks. I have a shelf-full of them, but I mostly find recipes online (or scan them into MasterCook) and look there. I have lots of recipes I haven't converted yet from the old MasterCook version; I think I got to "C" or so, which means I have lots of chicken recipes but not a lot of pork ones.

So when I went looking for a chicken recipe, I found something that I didn't remember making before, and it sounded very tasty, but not very healthy. So, of course, I made it.

Tetrazzini is not an Italian dish, oddly enough; it's American. The recipe I have is from Gourmet Magazine.


4 pounds chicken—cut in pieces
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 pound mushrooms—thinly sliced
3 tablespoons medium dry sherry
5 tablespoons unsalted butter
nutmeg—to taste
1/2 pound spaghetti
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese—grated
2 tablespoons flour

In a kettle, combine the chicken with enough salted water to cover it by 2 inches. Bring water to a boil, and simmer the chicken for 20 minutes or until it is tender. Let chicken cool in the broth, separate the meat from the skin and bones, returning the skin and bones to the broth. Cut the meat into strips and reserve. Simmer the broth until it is reduced by half, strain through a fine sieve, discarding the solids. Skim off fat. Boil the stock until it is reduced to about 2 cups.

Meanwhile, in a large saucepan, cook the mushrooms in 2 tbsp butter over mod-low heat, stirring, until they are softened. In a kettle of boiling salted water, cook spaghetti until it is al dente. Drain it well. In a saucepan melt remaining butter over mod-low heat. Add flour and cook the roux, stirring, for 3 minutes. Whisk in the reserved broth, cream and sherry. Bring the sauce to a boil, whisking, and simmer it for 5 minutes. Season with nutmeg and salt and pepper to taste.

Stir half into the mushrooms with the spaghetti and transfer it to a well-buttered 2-1/2-qt. baking dish, making a well in the center. Add the chicken meat to the remaining sauce, combine well. Spoon this into the center of the spaghetti and sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. Bake in the middle of a preheated 350F oven for 25-30 minutes or until pale golden in color. Serve immediately.

Now, I left out the nutmeg as I object to it except in pumpkin and squash pies and confectionary of that nature. The rest of the recipe, though fiddly, is rather good. I am a great believer in making chicken broth if you're going to use it. Unfortunately, it's so much easier to use chicken powder or bouillon cubes that I don't do it often. This worked perfectly, and I have some left over in the fridge for, perhaps, chicken orzo soup.

I didn't use Harvey's Bristol Cream sherry, as that's a bit too tasty for cooking. I also didn't use cooking sherry, as that's vile stuff that should never grace a cupboard. I used Tesco's best dry sherry, won at a church raffle. It was nice, and it gave me an excuse to have some Harvey's on the rocks. I do have Chinese rice wine, which is sherry-like in flavour, so if you have some of that you could use it rather than make a trip to the package store.

I didn't have a ceramic or glass baking dish big enough for this, so I used my metal pot. Just right. I greased the sides with a bit of butter on a paper towel, wiping it around the sides the the bottom. Worked a treat.

HWMBO loved the dish and took some to work the next day for lunch. The dish has a creamy, buttery, cheesy taste that brings me back to the days when we could eat cream, butter, and cheese to our hearts' delight. As long as you don't eat it weekly, or dishes like it, you too can relive the days of the 1950's, when Craig Claiborne's New York Times Cookbook was the King of Cookbooks.

The theme in the vintage ads community this week is Jell-o™ and other gelatine products. I liked Jell-o™ when I lived in the US (it's not available here in the UK, as far as I'm aware, although there are other Jell-o™-like foods).

So, many of the ads reproduced in the community have to do with that quintessentially 1950's food, the gelatine salad.

So perhaps you'd like to make some of this:



1 envelope unflavoured gelatine
1/2 cup cold water
1/4 cup finely-chopped onion
3 tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup mayonnaise
1 1/2 cups finely-shredded cabbage
1 can corned beef, separated into chunks
1 cup chopped celery
1/2 cup pickle relish

Soften gelatine in water in small saucepan. Dissolve over low heat, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and stir in onion, lemon juice, and salt. Gradually stir into mayonnaise. Blend in remaining ingredients. Turn into 1-quart mold and chill 2 hours or until firm. Unmould and serve. Serves 8.

Then again, perhaps not.

London Stabbie has been quite annoyed today. He has resurrected his old computer in order to ensure that everything useful is removed, and exported his recipe book this morning. Now there is nothing more useful in keeping and disseminating and sharing recipes than a computer. One would think that after many years of storing recipes on computers someone would have figured out a good way of exporting recipes and then importing them into another computer or another program. One would be wrong. Very wrong. As wrong as drinking shiraz with lemon sole.

Stabbie was amazed at the speed of the export from a very old version of Mastercook into a text file. Less than 5 seconds for 2MB of recipes (Stabbie has lots of recipes).

Stabbie then copied the file into his new computer and fired up Mastercook 11, guaranteed to work with Windows 7. Then he imported the recipe file, and while there were a few mistakes (reported by the software) most of the recipes seemed to be imported fairly well.

So Stabbie took at look at his mother's recipe for spaghetti and meatballs. He was surprised to learn that it required no meat, no tomatoes, but a lot of flour and sugar and baking powder. Somehow Mastercook had slipped a gear and missed out several recipes, putting the wrong labels on the subsequent ones.

So Stabbie deleted all the recipes, and opened the text file with the exported recipes in it. He now has to import them 10 or 20 at a time and go through each. Some have ingredients misplaced, and others don't have the instructions or notes correct. Stabbie has more than 1500 recipes in his database. He's not looking forward to the next four months.

Cooking software is written by dweebs for noobs.

This is also true for geneological software.

Stabbie would like to get the programmers, and especially the people who arranged the user interfaces and the import and export engines, into a very small dining room, lock them in, and feed them chocolate cake iced with Ex-Lax. The toilets will not be accessible.

I mentioned on Facebook that I'd made cream of asparagus soup and steak with cream and sherry sauce last night. One of my Facebook friends (hi, Jeanne!) asked for the recipe for the soup. Well, I'll give you both and some ventures into corn muffins and corn bread.

The secret behind asparagus in soups is to ensure that the entire woody stem (up to the green part) is removed. Otherwise, you will have a very fibrous soup. As for amounts, I'm pretty vague about those because I don't usually measure much unless I'm baking, where measurement is key to success.

A couple (as many as you like, actually) of bunches of mature asparagus
One or two onions, sliced
A green bell pepper, chopped roughly
Perhaps three or four new potatoes, peeled and sliced
About a quart or a quart and a half of stock, either vegetable or chicken. DO NOT USE BEEF!
A tablespoonful of vegetable oil NOT OLIVE OIL!
1/2 pint of single cream (in the US="light cream") and some milk
A glug of dry sherry
Bouquet garni
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oil in your soup pot. Sauté the onion and green pepper until they're soft but not burned. Put the stock in the pot. Then top and tail the asparagus. Reserve the tips, and discard the root ends or throw them in the stock pot, not in your soup. Cut it into small (1/2" or 1 cm) pieces. Add the asparagus to the pot, along with the peeled potatoes if you're using them. Put the bouquet garni in the pot and bring to a boil. Then turn the heat down until the pot is barely bubbling, and let it simmer until the asparagus and potatoes are cooked very soft.

Now remove the bouquet garni, and pass the rest through a food processor or blender until smooth. Return to the pot, add the cream, milk and sherry and stir to blend. Taste, and correct seasoning with salt and pepper. Put the heat back on and let the soup bubble gently. Don't let it boil now or the milk and cream will separate from the rest of the soup.

Meanwhile, take the asparagus tips and place in a microwave-safe bowl with a bit of water. Microwave on high for 4 minutes. Dump the cooked tips and water into the pot and stir to blend. When as hot as you like it, serve with warm French bread and butter and perhaps a side salad.

Things I did yesterday that I shouldn't have but have learned my lesson from:

—Don't use the root ends in the soup. At all. It will leave fibers in the soup that the food processor can't deal with and that will floss your teeth while you eat.
—Don't put celery in with the onions and pepper to sauté. There are fibers in that too.
—Make sure the pepper is a green capsicum. Do not use a red-coloured pepper. The colour is not destroyed by cooking. I believe you could use a yellow pepper, but not an orange one.
—The idea of the soup is for the flavour of the asparagus to come out. Thus, strong flavoured things like olive oil or garlic will add their flavour to the soup and mask the asparagus.
—I suppose you could cook the tips in the soup itself after the soup has been processed, but it will take longer.

Now I just made all this up myself; I didn't get it from a recipe book. This has advantages—I only try to use a recipe book when amounts are important as in baking or I'm not familiar with the dish I'm trying to make. Finally, it sounds really complicated but it isn't. Soups have more to do with cutting things up and seasoning them than actual preparation.

The second culinary adventure was Steak with Sherry and Cream sauce. I have an inkling that this is called something else—steak Diane, perhaps? I can't be arsed to look it up at the moment.

Two good steaks (for two)
Butter
Salt and pepper to taste
Cracked peppercorns
About 5 or 6 medium sized mushrooms, sliced.
One medium onion, sliced.
Glug of dry sherry
Some single cream

Crack the peppercorns under a rolling pin, and sprinkle both sides of the steaks with the cracked pepper and salt and press it into the meat. Melt the butter in a frying pan. If you have your mother's black frying pan, that's best. When the butter is bubbling, add the steaks and turn the heat down to medium. Add the mushrooms and onion, and sauté them along with the steak, making sure that the steaks and vegetables share the pan amicably.

When the steaks are done (try them, perhaps by cutting into them, to test doneness. Please don't do them well-done—the spirit of the cow will come back and haunt you that evening, I assure you.) transfer them to a warmed plate in a barely warm oven. Immediately turn the heat up under the frying pan a bit and add the glug of sherry and stir madly until it's combined with the juices and remaining butter. Add the single cream (not a lot, perhaps less than 1/4 pint, but it's up to you how much you use) and stir until warmed through. Put the steaks on the serving plate, spoon the onion and mushrooms over them, then the sauce. Serve with a salad, mashed potatoes, and a green vegetable or perhaps two.

HWMBO thought it was lovely, and he doesn't like beef very much. I suspect you could do this with pork steaks or pork chops as well, or even what we used to call Salisbury Steaks, although you'd probably have to fry them in a separate pan and transfer them, as they will exude lots of beef fat which will probably impart a rather strong oily flavour to the sauce.

Finally, I've been trying for perfect cornbread this week. I won't relate the recipes I've used, as I haven't come up with the one I like best yet. The first two were muffins, and the third is bread in a pan. The first one was too sweet (I used Splenda instead of sugar in a 1-to-1 ratio from the recipe). The second one was too cakey (not enough cornmeal and too much flour). The third one was very corney but my oven screwed up and I had to bake it for almost an hour rather than the 25 minutes recommended in the recipe. My quest continues. I shall have to buy more cornmeal.

This has been a weird day. This afternoon we walked to Tate Britain to see the Hogarth exhibition. While I love those prints and paintings of 18th century London, with recognisable landmarks like St. Martin-in-the-Fields, St. Giles-in-the-Fields, and Covent Garden, the crowds were gathered around trying to read the text on the bottom of each print. Traffic jams galore. The same thing happened at the Blake exhibition a few years ago. What lovely paintings of the gentry he did! I enjoyed it immensely; I think that HWMBO wasn't as enamoured--he got through it a lot quicker than I did.

Up to the Members Room for coffee and a piece of cake. It's very intimate--kind of like a transit caff with art on the walls. Then walk back home, past the Imperial War Museum.

So I had bought ground beef for a meatloaf. Instead of breadcrumbs, I thought I'd use the leftover rice in the fridge to bulk it up. Well, my advice is: don't. The meatload was tasty enough, but more like porridge than meatloaf: it never really firmed up. What a pain! Oh, well, HWMBO ate it without complaining, which is only one of the many reasons I'm in love with him every day.

One thing that confuses me is the fact that the English are unfamiliar with meatloaf. When I grew up, meatloaf was the standard way of using a large amount of ground beef with a relatively large amount of breadcrumbs bulking it up. It's an American comfort food that is great with mashed potatoes and vegetables, and even better after being refrigerated overnight and sliced thin for sandwiches. I really love it! HWMBO isn't wild about it as beef is not one of his favourite foods. But I often eat his comfort food (Chinese soups, stir-fried vegetables with chicken or pork, and the like) and find it wonderful. I will break down and make a proper meatloaf next week. Don't tell HWMBO, though; he might be a bit cross.



Mother Hansen's Meatloaf

1-1/2 lbs ground beef
1 cup breadcrumbs
1 onion, diced
1 green pepper, diced
2 stalks of celery, diced
1 egg
salt, pepper, oregano, basil to taste
Worcestershire sauce and tabasco sauce, to taste but liberally when you like it.
One can condensed cream of mushroom soup (optional)

Put the ground beef and diced onion, pepper, and celery in a large bowl, pour the breadcrumbs over it, and break the egg into the breadcrumbs. Add salt, pepper, oregano, and basil and start to knead the mixture with your hands. Don't be afraid to get them stuck right in. Once well mixed, add the Worcestershire sauce and tabasco and mix again.

Put the mixture into a loaf pan and pack it tightly. Run a butter knife around the edges, and turn the meatloaf out onto a rack in a deep pan. Place the rack in an oven set to gas mark 6, and leave for about 3/4 hour.

If desired, after 3/4 hour take the can of condensed cream of mushroom soup, spoon it over the mostly-cooked meatloaf, and ice the meatloaf as if you were icing a cake. Return the meatloaf to the oven for about 15 minutes, then remove and let the meatloaf set for a bit before slicing. Serve with beef gravy, mashed potatoes, and vegetables.

I do wish that I'd followed the recipe.

I'm currently listening to The Archive Hour on Radio 4, which has been playing the tapes of the Falkland Islands Broadcasting Service during the Argentine invasion. Very interesting stuff.