the middle knitter

(I should preface this by saying that the reason it's important enough to merit such a long post is that I'm just barely beginning to spread my wings and cook for myself, so it's exciting.)

Last semester, I hatched the idea to get around my lack of lunch three days a week by making a semester's worth of soup, freezing it in individual baggies, so that I could put them in a thermos for lunch! They all had to be bean soups, because apparently soup doesn't freeze all that well, but beans do. Well, today was Soup Day.

I got up before 9am so that I could go shopping at Wal-mart for ingredients (thanks to the lovely Ginny's gracious driving). I bought ingredients for three soups: black bean soup, lentil soup with vegetables, and three bean soup with ham. I set the beans to soak as soon as I got back, and the cooking started at about 3:00.

I tried the black bean first. It didn't work out very well. It scorched on the bottom, and the scorched flavor managed to get through the rest of the soup. Also, even setting that aside, and setting aside the fact that I was practically dumping in cumin and cayenne, it didn't have that much flavor. Eh, you win some, you lose some. I'm not throwing it out, because I only had enough freezer bags to make exactly the right amount of soup for the semester, and because I didn't know how well the other soups would turn out, 13 of them are filled with the black bean. I'll eat the others first, and if I decide the black bean is edible, I'll eat it--if not, I'll throw it out.

The lentil soup turned out fantastic. I made a good lentil soup at Thanksgiving while I was staying with a friend, and it sold me on the beauty of a simple lentil soup--I was shocked at the idea that a soup could taste great without any sort of fat or anything in it. The soup I made today had lots of garlic and onion, and carrots and celery, but I also added a little bit of cayenne pepper, which made a huge difference. It wasn't enough to make the soup spicy, just enough to give it a little kick. I came downstairs and told my roommates that I had just made a kickass lentil soup. EV said that soup isn't generally something that can be described as "kickass", but I maintain that this soup is.

Finally, the ham and bean soup also rocked. I used pinto beans, great northern beans, and black eyed peas, with some chunks of . . . well, something that amounted to big hunks of pig fat. I dunno--it was in with the hambones, but there were no bones. It was only $2.50, so I'm not arguing. And lots of garlic and onion, of course, both fresh and in powder. And since the cayenne worked so well with the lentils, I added a bit of that too. It tastes great!

Now it's 11:30. I just spent seven hours in the kitchen--I think the technical term for that is "slaving over a hot stove". Things I learned:

--I like cooking, but it gets old after five or six hours.
--Cumin smells really, really good.
--Cayenne is awesome. (And a little goes a long way--but I didn't learn that the hard way!)
--It's really hard to spoon soup into plastic freezer bags. And really messy.
--I can actually make food that tastes good!
--I learned a lot more about cooking from my mom than I thought I did.

I also discovered that I cook a lot the same way that I knit. I can try to follow a pattern, but I much prefer just to make it up as I go. And if I do try to follow the directions, I'll inevitably end up changing the number of stitches and decreasing differently and dumping in a bunch of parsley and extra garlic (always!). It's just so boring to follow directions--there's so much more opportunity to be surprised if you're always making everything up as you go along.

Of course, I know a lot more about how knitting works than I do about how cooking works. So, the opportunity for completely screwing up is still pretty open. But, if that happens, it happens.

I spent $66 in Wal-mart. I bought several things that weren't for the soups, so let's say I spent $55 buying stuff for soup--and that includes a big pot, a bottle of olive oil, and a few jars of spices, stuff most people would already have around. With that $55, I made enough soup to keep me in lunches three days a week for the rest of the semester.

There are 14 weeks in the semester. That comes out to just under $4 a week. That's like one trip to McDonalds, and my food is a lot healthier. The point? Beans are basically the best thing EVER--they're cheap, filling, nutritious, and easy to make. Oh, and super versatile.