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

[labrat2.livejournal.com]

Funny. I soaked some Great Northerns last night and have a smoked ham hock (actually a shank since they didn't have hocks) on the stove right now! I'm making bean soup and always use the smoked ham parts to make it.

Mmmmmmmm.... soup.

I've used canned beans in soup, before. It ususally comes out fine. I just like to have the dried ones on hand and actually use them because they store so nicely.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Ooo, what's your recipe? How'd it turn out?

That's what I love about dried beans: you can store them for so long in such a small space. I guess canned will store for a good while too, now that I think about it.

[labrat2.livejournal.com]

It's still cooking, but...

Recipe isn't really written down. I got it from my mom. I usually cook a couple of smoked ham hocks (or in this case a smoked ham shank) with an onion and stalk of celery and some pepper corns covered in enough water to cover things for a couple of hours. Then you take that stuff out, cut off the meat from the shank or hocks and add it back to the strained stock. I can't remember how many beans I usually use, but this time I used 1 lb of dried beans. If you don't use the dried beans, you could use lentels or split peas. That's what's great about soup. You just kind of throw stuff in the pot according to what you have or your mood or both :D.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

That sounds easy and scrumptious! Ham hocks, onion, celery, pepper corns, random legume. Cool.

I bet if I do a few more soups that turn out well, I'll start to gain the courage to throw things in randomly. :)

[labrat2.livejournal.com]

Doh... I was going to edit my comment...

EDIT: And even though I responded about the spices and herbs the way I did, doesn't mean I actually throw them out when I'm supposed to. I hate for things to go to waste. The closest I came to actually following that guideline was when we were moving and I pitched the older or less expensive stuff. Sheesh... I managed to get a bunch of cardamom at a really good price in some Indian grocery in the Bay Area before we moved. I'll be doing my best to preserve that because it's bloody expensive if you buy it in the regular grocery.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I don't throw 'em out soon enough either, because I hate throwing away anything. I bet I was comical, yesterday, throwing away the remnants of some too-old flour so I could put the new flour in the storage tub. Waaah! Flour! Being wasted!