Making good with what's on hand!

Yesterday I took a quick look in the refrigerator to see what I had on hand, in fact I kind of felt like Old Mother Hubbard felt when she opened her cupboard, though I wasn't looking for a bone for my dog, but something to put to use before for it would spoil and I would have to be throwing it away. This probably happens more often to people who have gotten used to eating out of a can, box or something else that they for some reason seem to think has an infinite shelf life. When they buy something fresh, they think they can put it in the fridge and it will keep forever, however this isn't the case. The refrigerator simply delays the spoilage of certain foods for different periods of time.

What's in the cupboard?

I always have a number of containers of different legumes on hand as they have become an important part of my new and healthier food lifestyle. At the given time I have about a pound or two of each of the following: black turtle beans, brown lentils, plain green lentils and green Du Puy lentils, pinto beans and white navy beans. My mother has asked me more than once, “Why do you buy so many beans?” and has often says to me: “How and why can you eat beans, don't they give you flatulence?”

The answer to her first question is simple. I like variety. Each of these different type of pulses has a different taste and different characteristics. I also tell her that they are high in dietary fibre, protein, and contain many vitamins and minerals. Regarding the answer to the second question she poses, I tell her it's all chemistry and how they are prepared, and what spices and other foods I eat with them she doesn't believe me. I understand why she doesn't believe me and I long ago decided it wasn't worth my efforts to read her lectures about food. She, like I had become victims of our circumstance in a number of different ways.

For the most part my father loved to cook while he was still with us and I he didn't like things in cans, he liked real food! I probably made my first crepes with him in the kitchen was I about ten or eleven years, old. I had gone berry and mushroom picking with him, we had tapped birch trees for their sap and had gone fishing. We knew where most of food came from. If we had any type of beef it was because my father together with his good friend, would find the farmer who raised healthy beef cattle, and together they buy an entire head to have slaughtered, butchered and packed for freezing.

During my childhood years I can remember the onslaught of advertising of frozen TV dinners, different food stuffs in cans and boxes all aimed at home-makers to make their preparation of meals for their families more convenient. That was one of the first circumstances which effected the way my mother looked at food. The second circumstance was the loss of my father when I was a teenager. It was a very disruptive event in the life of our family, and bit by bit anything that was healthy slowly crept out of regular diet. This happened both due to both reasons of economics as well as the perceived time saving factor of getting your food out of a box, created by the major food processing concerns and the food like substance manufacturers of the day.

So yesterday from the cupboard I pulled two ingredients: pinto beans and basmati rice. The first thing I did was put about a cup and bit, into a bowl and topped it off with filtered water. Covering the beans completely, I have read a lot and even seen some top top chef's suggest this should be done to eliminate some of the lectin and phytates and stachyose found in beans, which will to different degrees contribute to flatulence, because of their difficulty to digest. Remember, gas in our digestive tracts is a “byproduct of bacterial fermentation”, the less material that is there to ferment, the less flatulence you will have.

However, I think that the greatest amount of chemistry that does take place is in one's digestive track, and once your have developed the proper chemistry in your stomach, and you properly chew your food, which is the first step in the digestive process, the level of flatulence will decrease. In addition, when I cook beans I often include either and ginger and turmeric as part of the finished dish, as these two ingredients aid in the digestion process.

Not quite bare – so let's get cooking

While the refrigerator was practically bare, I had a few leeks that I decided to make use of along with some yellow onion, garlic and what I have left of cherry tomatoes from the vegetable garden by the side of the house. Just about enough cherry tomatoes to fill a cup with once they were halved. As for the ingredients to add some taste to whatever it was that I was going to be cooking up there was cayenne pepper, turmeric, and a little bit of fresh basil, that I have growing in a small pot and it's always in the kitchen. This was my first stab at growing fresh herbs, but now I'm certain I'm going to be planting a few more to go along with my fresh basil. When they are fresh they just taste so much better than when they are dried.

There are a few different aspects of the ingredients of what I ended up putting together yesterday, but one of the most important aspects I have learnt to appreciate over the years is understanding how long different foods take to cook. Hence, we will call that timing! And timing just doesn't only apply to how long certain things take to cook, but when you will be adding certain spices to your food. At times you may want to spice things earlier in the cooking process as well as towards the end.

A good example of this, though it doesn't directly apply to what I cooked up yesterday, is that I would never bother adding fresh parsley or dill to a soup at the beginning of the cooking because all of their taste and aromatics would be gone by the time you are ready to serve your soup. Whereas, depending on how it is being cooked, garlic that is still fresh will have its nice sharpness though if you put a few whole clean cloves into a soup, their flavour will infuse the other ingredients in your soup with quite a different and milder taste.

The ingredients and putting it together

While it may seem simple enough, because I am a storyteller and not a professional cook,

I am making a decision today that I will try to stick to in the future as to how I write about the foods I'm preparing. That decision is to list the main ingredients in order of those things which take the longest to cook first, and then leading down to those things which you add later on, based on either their properties – particularly with spices, and their cooking times – other ingredients.

Long cook ingredients

Pinto beans – 3/4 cup

Medium cook ingredients

Basmati rice – 2/3 cup

Quick cook ingredients and spices

Cayenne pepper – ground, amount according to heat desired on the Scoville scale

Garlic – two cloves, cleaned, finely chopped

Ginger root, raw about one and half table spoons – peeled, finely sliced and cut into thin strips

Leek – one, cleaned, sliced 1/2 inch to 3/4 pieces, separated

Yellow onion – one medium, cleaned, finely diced

Turmeric, ground – one teaspoon

Yield: For two adults

Yield: For two individuals each

Calories	Carbohydrates	Fat	Protein	Cholesterol	Fibre
476	51	1	7	0	7

As you know from above my pinto beans have been soaking in water so at this point I drain of the water add fresh water and add them to my pot for cooking, with enough water to cover them completely. Some friends of mine who are all thumbs in the kitchen have often asked me. “How do you know how long you should cook things?” A lot of this comes with experience, but that experience truly started to develop once I was living on my own and developed a a desire to make things other than macaroni and cheese. I went out and bought myself a paperback edition of The Joy of Cooking published by Plume. It has served me well and in retrospect, now that I think about it, it was my first cook book and somehow maybe the Irma S. Rombaurer's non-traditional style of culinary writing may have rubbed off on me.

In regards to cooking beans, you want to make sure the are soft enough to bite and chew as a rule and depending on the type of bean they will take different times, based on factors such as their age, their fluid levels when you start the cooking process, and their size. Though I have told most of my friends who ask me about cooking beans, that if you can boil water you can cook beans. Having soaked my pinto beans in water did cause them to expand a bit as the absorbed some the water, and there are other beans such as navy beans and Lima beans which both usually absorb water at a greater rate than pintos and will expand much more.

Patience is a virtue

Don't try rushing your beans by turning the heat up to high on your stove. My experience is that beans are the best when slowly simmered. So patience is definitely a virtue with any types of beans. From my reading and experimentation in the kitchen over the last year, my beans have always been the tastiest when allowed to simmer slowly. I will later on in my personal food journey, take you back to some soup recipes whose two or three main ingredients were different types of beans. This soup or stew, which took as long as three hours on top of the stove, was wholesome tasty and full of goodness for that cool November night when I was in the heart of Catholic Germany.

 At the beginning you can bring your water up to a boil at first just to give them a jumps start, then turn them down to simmer and let them stew away. Check them on occasion and stir them tenderly. Quite often I do select a pot which is a little too small for the volume of beans I have, though at other times, I used whatever vessel I had at hand and if need be about 30-40 minutes into the cooking process, given that some of the fluid had boiled off, I would add up to a cup of room temperature water.

Every once in a while I always pluck out a bean or two on the end of a spoon, and check it out. I check it in two different ways. The first test is purely mechanical. As we have all observed, beans have a thin skin on them, which is the membrane which kept all the good stuff in place before they were dried for long term. If you simply blow on the bean you have on your spoon and that membrane separates itself from the body of the bean, your beans are cooked. If it doesn't you can let cook it off a bit and pop it in your mouth and give it a chew for texture. If you like it kind of al dente then you can check a couple more to see if they are of the same consistency, if they are and to your liking, then get those things off your fire.

Multitasking is nothing new

While it may have not happen the first time, as you become more experienced in your kitchen you will understand when to start cooking the other ingredients. As time goes on you make better judgement calls, and you start to understand that you should have started cooking one of your ingredients sooner than later. If you have ever watched any of the cooking shows that are on both on PBS, the main networks and cable, you will very quickly understand how much multitasking is going on in any kitchen. This multitasking is so related to understanding you ingredients, how long they need to cook and at what temperature.

I don't know how many of you had to experience beef liver or any other liver as children that was as tough as shoe leather? If I am not mistaken, as a result of this you hated liver. In short it wasn't the fault of the person who was trying to provide you with protein and iron and all the other good things that liver is supposed to contain, but their lack of understanding of how it should be prepared. Liver is one of those things that if over cooked does become as hard as shoe leather. So, please take note, liver and many other things have their optimal way of being prepared. This also applies to the beans and rice that make up the core protein and carbohydrate component of this meal.

Some time during prior to or during the period that you have started you beans on their merry way, you will have wanted to start to prep your quick cook ingredients: garlic, ginger, leek and onion. This all goes pretty quickly and with time you can do all of this within ten to fifteen minutes.

Garlic is a simple clean and prep. Use a wide bladed kitchen knife, and crush the clove by applying pressure to it the clove under the blade and pressing down on the blade with the heel of your hand. You will then be able to easily clean off the outer skin, and also trim off parts that may have gone bad during storage. Just remember, just like canned goods don't last for ever nor do natural products. Once you have it cleaned, slice it in fine pieces – little one millimetre pieces that will cook rapidly, and mix in with all the other ingredients.

Ginger, has some incredible properties. When I was quite young, I would hear older people say: “If your stomach is upset drink some Ginger Ale!” While it may have been laced with a lot of sugar, there was some truth to their statements. As you read above, I like to mix such food with when I am eating legumes as it helps with digestion and settling the stomach. I have seen some foodies take the outer part of the root of ginger off with the end of a spoon, but I on the other hand always try to select big roots when I am shopping to make it easier to clean with a sharp blade.

The leek, as sibling of garlic and onion, has a much more dispersed structure and not as dense as a clove of garlic. This makes it something special during the cleaning process. Not that I intend on sounding rude or crass, but making sure your leeks are clean, involves a little fingering.

Leeks like other plants have growth rings in order that leek so well cleaned from dirt and sediment that it has gathered in the field while developing what I usually do is the following: first, I remove and of the green part of the leek by peeling it down to its root. This I discard. If you have a compost heap, or if your municipality has pick of for biological matter this is the stuff you want to go into that bin. Then I slice the leek against its grain. If this were a piece of lumber and a great deal bigger I would probably want to be using a cross-cut saw, but a good sharp kitchen knife will do in this case. Cut your leek into pieces that are about a centimetre or half an inch. Toss away the root with all your other waste, and place what you have sliced up some place that you can fill with water and start using your fingers.

With all that leek floating in water, slowly use your fingers to push out each different layer of the leek from its outer leaf. Do this until you have done it to all of the pieces, a process which I have lovingly named – fingering. At times you will find dirt and grit between some of the leaves. I assure you that is not stuff you want to be eating, while it may not kill you, your leeks will taste much better without the dirt and grit. Try to remove the excess water. Do it any way you wish but I have found that a salad spinner works well.

Yellow Onion, this is another quickie! Take your knife and cut of the extremities of the onion. Then cut a slit down the side of the onion from the top to bottom. Having cut this slit you can easily remove the first outer skin, though do not remove to many of the layers. Some research has shown that some of the best nutrients of the onion are in the first outer layers. Once you have have done that, slice your onion against the grain. Then simply by cutting perpendicular against the grain on the slices you end up with nicely diced onions.

Rice and beans – Oh Yeah!

By the time you have had your beans cooking, and have done all your prep, do a quick check on your beans as suggested above. You may have found them ready earlier in the process. For example, I am looking at creating hummus from a number of different types of beans. I found that navy beans cook a lot faster than a number of other beans that I have worked with.

Rice, is the boon or bust of anyone in the kitchen. It either comes out like mush or something else. Sure some people will go out and spend a poor man's ransom on a rice cookers, but that doesn't help you in becoming a better cook. First of all I don't have money to throw away on unnecessary conveniences for inept cooks, and secondly I would never do so. It must be my Scottish/Irish/Ukrainian roots! And I will tell you right now, rice is not part of their regular diets.

What, I has worked well when I prepare any type of rice, is to make sure I have a pot or skillet with a cover. Though while many don't take this into account our elevation above sea level can have its varying effects. Whatever type of rice you use, before you add liquid, you can toast the rice a little with some olive oil or butter. It will give your end product a different taste. The proportions of liquid to rice are are usually two to one... Cooking medium – water, vegetable or other stock to rice. So with two thirds of a cup of rice in our case, we use one and a half (1.5) cups of water. I usually temper my rice with either the butter or oil a bit first. The spices I want to flavour the rice usually comes later, for the reasons I spoke about earlier. The best success I have had is when I bring it all to a boil, and then turn it down to simmer for about twenty minutes.

Ideally, if I have calculated what has to be calculated in my so to speak Nadsat gulliver, I would be able to conjure up a rice that would be perfect. And in the last number of years, since I have understood how important is was of staying undercover, my rice has been delectable!

Quick cook and full of yum...with what is above

With your rice cooking it is time to throw your quick cook into a frying pan with some good wholesome olive oil. Starting with the most dense elements. Your ginger, garlic and onions, followed very shortly by your well fingered and cleaned dry leeks. To decrease the cooking time I often cover all these ingredients in a frying pan, with the top of a some other cooking vessel in order to trap some of the heat, and steam that is escaping from these foods. Let them cook in their own juices!

By the time that all those ingredients are playfully creating an orgy of flavour, your rice and beans should be ready.

Try to monitor your rice to make sure you do not burn it. It does happen sometimes but if you pay attention over time you will learn your stove, its heat and what you are cooking on it. If you have managed not to be over zealous on checking your rice, it should be nice and fluffy, and not soggy and super moist – soggy in short. In time you will learn how to get your rice just right, without spending money on a rice cooker.

When your beans are ready drain the water... and put them in the pan with all those quick cook things... Before putting in your cooked rice, this is when I usually add my cayenne pepper and turmeric, and give a a very good mix amongst the vegetative ingredients. Ensuring that everything is coated in a sea of bright red and yellow. Once I have done this, I mix in the rice and also try to ensure a homogeneous mixture of all ingredients. This becomes more apparent as the rice starts to take on the bright yellow of the turmeric. Sometimes this may take up to about five minutes or maybe longer depending on your portion size. In the end you have a tasty and nutritious meal.

 Sure, my description of preparing this little delicious tidbit took some time, nonetheless, I hope anyone who tries this out will give me feedback about it.