Living the Pantry Lifestyle - Still Learning

Image: Flicker

My continuing education in cooking from the pantry will prove beneficial in the very long run. Especially as I'm trying different bean meals. My latest attempt at pinto bean soup was absolutely delicious and it could have been this way years ago.

I don't know why it takes so long for us me to try different ways of cooking. As so often recently, it was a suggestion from An Everlasting Meal that sparked the latest success. Tamar Adler shared why most of us have bland bean soup and why the soup she made for Chez Panisse was delicious. It is because we I have believed an old wive's tale about not salting beans that are cooking from the very beginning.

Yes, the test kitchen at Cook's Illustrated published the same opinion a few years ago but I thought that could not possibly be correct. After all, it has been in every instruction I have ever read about cooking beans from the time I started cooking. But I had to admit that everything else I had learned from Adler's book had been correct.

So... with nothing really to lose, I followed her instructions for bean soup and provided plenty of water from the get go (for the beans create their own broth), added an onion and a carrot, pepper, and... kosher sea salt. I think my hand was shaking at that time but I was determined to follow her instructions.

After about an hour on a low simmer, I tasted the beans and indeed they were almost soft and the stock it had created was absolutely amazing. I mean $15.00 a bowl in a nice restaurant amazing. At that time, I decided to add a few ham chunks left over from a previous meal as well as cubed potatoes to make it more of a stew than a soup. I simmered it until the potatoes were soft and by then the beans were also quite soft.

I'm going to make the soup again this week just like the last time but adding a Parmesan rind that I have in the freezer. She suggested it in the instructions but at the time I forgot I had one. I first heard of saving the rind from our Parmesan wedges from Lydia on PBS, another person who uses everything but the oink when she cooks. The Italians have done it for generations and used the rind in soups and sauces.

On that subject, Jacques Pepin also never throws anything away and on his PBS shows, quite often explains why he saves discarded parts of veggies, etc. when he cooks at home. Both Lydia and Jacques lived through WWII Europe when food could be hard to obtain. Which is why I also like to read cookbooks and articles about cooking during war years.

If you have not read An Everlasting Meal* and you do want to live a pantry lifestyle, I highly recommend it. I learn something every time I peruse the book so I've tended to leave it out where I can pick it up and read through part of a chapter. Sometimes just one page is read over and over for there is so much wisdom there.

An Everlasting Meal can be found... here.*

*Most links to Amazon are Associate Links. I thank you.

Unknown 10:53 AM Komentar