MMM BAKING. Basic cooking questions.

[cjsmith]

I came home last night to discover that Rob, when tidying up to leave for the weekend, had tossed three perfectly good squishy brown bananas into the trash. Those are now in a big loaf of banana bread. (It turns out they weren't quite squishy enough yet, but they were fine after sufficient violence from me.)

Then I pulled out the Northern beans I was soaking for soup [original typo: soap] and tried to figure out what to do with them given that the local grocery store didn't have a ham bone. Seriously. They had ham hocks... SMOKED ones. Last time I substituted meat-that-had-had-something-done-to-it for meat in a recipe I was very sorry. So I turned that into a sort of Tuscan white bean and sausage soup. Do you have any idea how hard it is to concentrate on chopping up stuff for soup when the aroma of banana bread is taking over your brain?

Now I could start a yeast bread dough rising, and I should, soon, if I want fondue tonight, but I'm restin' my feet for a bit.

Time for a poll:

[Poll #1143214]

Comments

[inflectionpoint.livejournal.com]

One thing to remember tho.

When adding a ham bone, you are adding flavor and very little salt. That goes in at the beginning.

Anything salty doesn't get added to beans till they are darn near cooked. Otherwise the salt hits their skins, they toughen up and become mysteriously impossible to cook soft no matter how long and how much you beg and plead with them. Beans get cooked about 2/3 of the way first and then the salty goodness gets added. I learnt this the hard way. I do not recommend this as a way to learn. It was sad.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Oh, good point: maybe I put the sausage in a bit early, because I tossed it in after the first boil-and-drain. Sausage is stuffed with salt. I guess I'll see. It's smelling reeeeeeally niiiiice... :-)

[labrat2.livejournal.com]

Oooo. Thanks for reminding me. I had that experience once before too and it took me a while to figure out it was the salt.