Red Kidney Beans

 It was my week for cooking and I thought I would make up the menus with the theme of red kidney beans in mind. These beans are excellent, cheap, nutritious and versatile. They are easier to deal with if bought tinned, but more expensive and less environmentally friendly.

So, on Sunday, I soaked plenty of dried beans overnight with a view to boiling them on Monday to form dishes for the week.  Cooking in large quantities (more than for one meal) may make the food a little repetitive (however good), but saves a lot of time and effort. And alterations can always be made.

On Monday I shopped at an Irish butcher's shop and the nearby market for ingredients.

The rough plan was to cook chilli-con-carne, a beef stew (to have the cooked beans added later), and a bean salad. Excess beans would be added to a "never-ending" soup - one that is on the go for most of the time, usually with occasional additions of superfluous food. When this soup has been finished, it is started again with a leek or onion and potato foundation, adding water, stock cubes pepper and salt.

I usually cook soaked beans in a pressure cooker, but cooking them needs different timings, depending on how dry the beans are in the first place. So now I favour fast boiling, followed by slow boiling - looking at them after 30 minutes and every so often after that. They need to be drained when the insides of the beans are soft and the outer part firm.  Strained well, they are put into a bowl and coated with olive oil to keep them from drying out. When cold they keep well in the refrigerator.

The stew is simply made of cubed stewing beef with any connective tissue cut away and discarded. I start with chopped onions and garlic cooked in groundnut oil until the onions are transparant, adding the beef, some flour, stock cubes, possibly tomato pureé, gravy browning (for looks), a herb or spice of some sort, and potatoes, peeled and cut into cubes. This cooks slowly for an hour or more until the beef is tender. It can now be eaten right away or wait until wanted, improving over time. But it must be brought to boil every day. Use only one herb or spice, otherwise should you add your favourite mixture each time the food will lose its individuality.

Now the chilli-con-carne. In plenty of groundnut oil (or other oil) cook minced meat of any kind until it has browned and the lumps been broken up. Add the chilli-con-carne powder, a stock cube, salt and water. Cook this slowly on the hob for it to become united. Then add the cooked beans. Again, heat it through each day until wanted, possibly adding water if it becomes too dry. Be generous with the oil.

I make my own chill-con-carne powder in a bowl with dry ingredients. I combine one measure of salt (I use a dessert spoon as my measure), one of chilli powder, one of powdered garlic, three of ground cumin, four of paprika, and three of oregano/marjoram. This is stirred together and kept in a sealed jar until wanted.

For the bean salad, I put the cooked beans into a bowl and add finely chopped shallot, some grated root ginger, some chopped fresh coriander leaves, with olive oil, vinegar (mine is home-made), pepper and salt.

If there are any beans left over from the above dishes, add them to the stew, the chilli, the soup or the salad.

As you may be making enough of each dish for a couple of meals, it will be time to sit back and think of different things. But of course other dishes will be fitting in between, like hot grilled lamb chops with a cold sharp salad, steamed cauliflower with a white cheese sauce, oven cooked with toasted breadcrumbs on top, or thick pork chops with well-scored skin and held together like a roast with wooden skewers. For this there will be no need to carve as if it was a joint, and the crackling should be perfect if the oven is good and hot.

You might like little bites with drinks before dinner. If you cut up a slice of bread (home-made is by far the best) into small cubes, fry them in olive oil with a pinch of chilli powder, turning them around all the time until crisp. Sprinkle sea salt over them before serving.

My week of cooking went quite well, and any unserved food left over went through the Mouli and into the soup.

Cooking is such fun - but it does take time.

Triggered thoughts

 An artist, like myself, who uses imagination in preference to producing pictures derived from what is in front of me, spends much time, night and day, in thought. And those thoughts are not always connected with the art in progress, but are often triggered by it or perhaps by general conversation. So there is a lot going on in an artist's head when he or she is not actually painting, sculpting or whatever.

Yesterday, for instance, my thoughts crossed from bidets to old aeroplanes to punishment, besides deciding that I would have to clean several pastels after finishing a composition that relates to a dog knocking over my first baby.

When using or just looking at a bidet, I keep reminding myself what a wonderful object it is. The French have realised this for years. 

As an impecunious student I would seek out saucy 18th century coloured French prints of the goings on in bedchambers, often aided by a maid with a hidden gentleman looking on. Framed, they adorned my  lavatory in the country. I bought them for a pittance from those sort-of sheds on the banks of the Seine in Paris. Many scenes featured a bidet, and used, as had always been the case, primarily to refresh and clean one's intimate parts. When leaving the countryside to return to London, these coloured prints fetched a surprisingly grand sum at auction.

The house I acquired in Hammersmith did not have a bidet, but a woman in the adjoining street, who had also bought at the same time, did have one, which she thoroughly disliked. So I had it plumbed in to my house - to our mutual satisfaction.

Not all French people find bidets essential to lower-body cleanliness, as the owner of the hotel in which we always stayed in Dieppe, had all the bidets in his hotel dispensed with. We have not returned there.

I then found myself thinking about weather and aeroplanes (they are close connected, but not in any way with bidets).

I rise early in the mornings, earlier in summer, and look out at the weather. I want to see what is happening with wind direction and speed, rain, clouds, frost, snow, ice, dew, the changing seasons, birds, and especially aeroplanes. I like to know which runway is in use when aircraft approach Heathrow from the East. Once a pilot, such observations become habitual and at times life-dependant.

Sadly, the shapes and variety of aircraft are merging into the form of an elegant body and two jet engines. Those with four engines seem to be out of favour as being less commercially economical.

I was pondering about which aircraft I had flown or been flown in that were a pleasure to the eye. I settled on the 1938, four-engined Ensign - now virtually forgotten. And for glorious eccentricity the obvious choice would be the 1931 HP 42, four-engined biplane. The large machine, that always looked to me as if it was a bit bent in the middle, flew from Croydon Aerodrome in London to Le Bourget in Paris. It travelled at a stately 100 miles an hour, giving its 40 passengers plenty of time to be served Champagne by the stewards. These aeroplanes were utterly reliable, but had one been in trouble it could have easily landed in a field, be mended, and then taken off again.

I suppose that thinking of 1930s aeroplanes took my mind back to school when I first took to the air as a child passenger in an Avro Tutor.

The water to flush the tiled urinary wall at school was housed high up in an iron cistern. With strong stomach muscles I was able to pee into it from floor level (boys will be boys). Word must have reached the headmaster about this misdemeanour. I was summoned to his office, short trousers down, bend over, swish, swish, swish, pain, trousers back on and return to class.

The red and blue welts crossing one's behind were almost a badge of courage and pride, being much admired by ones fellow students. 

Some schools, founded in times past, were geared not just to educate but to toughen up the boys (no girls at this school) to prepare them for running the Empire. Margreet. who is Dutch, thought that this treatment was most barbaric. We accepted it - had to. 

Aromas

 We are involved with smells from birth to death. They are mostly taken for granted and unnoticed unless especially odorous or malodorous, depending on the sensitivity of our brains.

As a child I was most receptive to the smell and taste of wine and happy about it until caught and punished for consuming the dregs in bottles (and flies, too, probably) left out for collection by our wine merchant. Emptied bottles were washed and re-used by the wine merchant in those far off days.

I certainly did not like the smell of rabbits that I had caught in snares or shot, and then paunched and skinned for the pot.

At the time of my youth I had no idea that my senses of smell and taste were so acute.I knew people by their smell and even knew when women were enduring their periods.

I put these abilities to good use later when I wrote on wine for newspapers and magazines. At tastings I was known for my direction and force of expectoration.

I remember that in middle age, and thus many years after schooldays, a man passed by me as I sat in a London bus. He had the smell of a school classmate. I felt obliged to confirm it by passing by him and turning around to get a sight of him. I was right - no doubt about it. I did not feel like renewing our acquaintance.

Again on a bus, I was aware of an unusual male perfume arriving behind me. It came from two American men whose voices had that degree of penetration peculiar to the race. But it was their conversation that made me forget their fragrance and listen to them. In considerable detail one relayed how his sister was invited to the White House in Washington and seduced by President Kennedy. As this was well before the President's peccadilloes had become common knowledge. It was fascinating information - far more interesting than the young men's aftershave.

My acuteness of smell decreased in my mid-eighties, so when I became aware of a new smell in the house in my mid-nineties, I thought that it possibly come from me. And at that time I had a dream that only people of my age and beyond were able and privileged to experience the exotic perfumes used by the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt. So, with this illusive smell around, was I being somehow influenced by such ridiculous dreams? 

And there were also the daily aromas to join in with the confusion of now and the past.These other perfumed aromas emanate from Margreet's den every morning. Some of her more recently acquired scents come from the Middle or Far East. They are heady and lustrous. Her French ones are finer and more sophisticated in their complexity. But do they or any others in their freshness or decline have any bearing on this illusive smell that sometimes surrounds me? What is it, I wonder? 

I think I'll run the bath.