90 Minute Beans

The Paupered Chef's recipe for 90 minute no soak beans may change my life. Just as the name suggests, it's 90 minutes from taking the beans out of their containers to having them done. Now, despite my frugality, I still buy a lot of canned beans. That's because conventional bean-making techniques take a long time. If this proves to be a useful recipe though, I can switch permanently to dried beans and save literally tens of cents. The recipe calls for a "dutch oven", which caused much mirth among my friends when I tried to tell them in person about this recipe. Hopefully, my internet readers are more mature.

90 Minute, No Soak Beans

Dried Beans

Salt

Preheat the oven to 250°. Put the beans into a pot with a tightly fitting lid (I used foil to keep the top on, this makes a big difference. Top the beans with about 4 cm of water and sprinkle with salt.

Bring to a boil (about 15 minutes) and then put in the oven for 75 minutes.

Serve.

I've had mixed results with this recipe, sometimes the beans come out a little too tough. I think that can be traced back to having lids that don't fit well enough. When I can try this with proper pots I may be switching for good.

The chickpeas turned out quite nice tonight, I made a mashup recipe where I combined curried chickpeas and tofu with Mjudraa with some expired mixed greens I got from a friend today (expired for, like, only a day! And he was going to throw them out!)

The House Cider Rules

My roommate has been thinking about making alcohol for a while. I like the sentiment, but beer seemed like it required too much of an infrastructure to start. Plus, we don't have a basement that could absorb any hypothetical explosion. Just when things seemed darkest for the possibility of homemade alcohol I discovered The Paupered Chef's three part series on making hard cider (Parts I, II and III).

Not a lot was required: apple juice, yeast, a container and an "airlock". An airlock is a mechanism that lets gas come out of the container while stopping bacteria from getting into it. A balloon with a pinprick in it could suffice and, as that sounded whimsical, we decided to make that our airlock.

So now we needed to go out and buy these products. We went to the Valumart to buy the apple juice, it would have to be one without preservatives. I originally misremembered this as without pasteurization which, as you can except, was not being sold. After a while of looking, I realized that everything in the store was going to be pasteurized and we ended up getting a 1.75 L bottle of "Simply Apple" Apple Juice. We also got a pack of balloons and, unrelated to this post but still pretty cool, a 10 lb sack of potatoes for $2. We weren't sure where to get yeast and briefly toyed with the idea of using baker's yeast. Thankfully, my friend Emma's dad pointed us to Danny's Wine and Beer Suppliers which is on the bus line.

I was in class all day, so my roommate ventured out to Danny's to purchase the yeast. We got Lalvin EC-1118 Champagne yeast (or, rather, yeast from the Champagne region). While there he decided to spend a few bucks to make an airlock, so we ended up not using the balloons after all. The mouth of the Simply Apple bottle was too big for the airlock, so we cleaned out an old pop bottle and poured the juice into there. Then we activated the yeast, which involves adding some warm water and waiting for about 15 minutes. The yeast packages are intended for bigger batches than we had, so there was a lot of improvised math. We erred on the side of too much yeast, because the supply of sugar was fixed and that was what was important. Just meant more sludge. So we tipped in the yeast, and let it ferment!

It was always fun opening up the closet we stored it in and watching the bubbles. Still, there was a bit of a pungent smell in said closet which did not bode well for the future. After a week was up, we opened it up and decided to taste it.

It was... actually pretty good. It tasted like a dry white wine with a hint of apples and, at least in the beginning, a nice fizz. Several of my friends tried it and expressed surprise that 1) it wasn't terrible and 2) that we did not go blind. It was especially gratifying even the slapdash way we went about making it. It's almost all gone now, but tomorrow we're probably going to get some more apple juice.

What will we do differently? Well, the way we did it wasn't terribly cost effective. It was a test run so we used a smallish bottle. For the next time we'll buy a bigger bottle of apple juice. Also, instead of champagne yeast we'll try lager yeast, which apparently creates a more cidery type flavour. We're also thinking about adding some honey to one of the batches to see what happens with the extra sugar and honey flavour. It's pretty good honey too – given to me by my friend Megan from her family bee farm. Maybe we'll ferment these ones in sanitized wine bottles to give it a classier touch than a pop bottle. Whatever we do, I'm looking forward to experimenting more with cider.

Sunday Frugal Sunday

Hello, my neglected readers. When I started this blog I mentioned I had created this as a summer hobby (in lieu of getting a goldfish named Pushpanathan¹). Since that time the blog has gotten literally tens of hits²! While traffic has not been noticeably down during September, my posting has been. Whycome? I was really busy in September (September included the first couple weeks of October just as the 60s actually continued until 1975³). This not only meant that I didn't have time to post but also that I wasn't eating very interesting food: lots of pasta with tomato sauce and cans of chickpeas (that's not pasta with tomatoes and chickpeas, but two separate items: I actually more than once just had a can of chickpeas for dinner). However, things have calmed down a bit. So I'll resume blogging, but probably the once-every-day posts some periods of the summer had won't return. Here is what I will do: try to make sure to post every Sunday. That doesn't mean I won't post in the rest of the week necessarily, but that there will be a type to check and see new content.

In lieu of a recipe or restaurant review, here is fascinating look at the history of modern ketchup (via a comment thread on home-made ketchup at The Paupered Chef)

1 I have since found out that Pushpanathan is not pronounced Push-pan-a-than but Push-pa-NA-than. This disappointed me greatly and my hypothetical goldfish will need a new name.
2 Actually I've gotten over 1000 pageviews. But I like that expression.
3 Many decades are like this. For example, the 50s lasted from 1948-1963.

Fiery Chickpea Soup

Mere days after I derided Ben Thanh's "spicy for white people" labelling policy, I fell into the same track with this post's headline. Think of the soup as "Fiery for White People Chickpea Soup". It's got a nice, but not strong, heat to it. I adapted the recipe from The Paupered Chef crowd over at Serious Eats (who in turn adapted it from here who adapted it from here. It's turtles all the way down). The soup is orginally called Tunisian Chickpea Soup, but given that I'm using an asian chili paste I don't know if I should claim that.

Fiery Chickpea Soup

1/2 large onion, chopped

Oil

14 ounce can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil

3 garlic cloves, minced

2 1/2 cups stock

1 teaspoon cumin

1 teaspoon red chili paste, I used Lee Kum Kee's Guilin Chili Sauce

Salt

Pour the oil into a soup pot and turn the heat to medium. Add the onions and cook until translucent. Add the garlic, cook for a minute, and then add the chickpeas, cumin, stock and chili paste. Simmer for 30 minutes. Season with salt, and serve.

Serves 2

Infusion Pasta

Earlier this year I had an epiphany about pasta based on two New York Times articles. The more recent one was about how we could use less water while cooking pasta (thus helping out the ol' environment). The second (via The Paupered Chef) was a recipe for risotto style pasta. Now, risotto is one of those things that can seem intimidating, thus "risotto style pasta" might seem like more effort than its worth. My epiphany, though, was to combine the two ideas in these two articles. What about pasta cooked in a small amount of stock (there's no need to ladle it in a bit at a time a la risotto)? It won't be a good idea for all kinds of pasta dishes – but its definitely more than appropriate for some. I mean it seems crazy to have the pasta release their starches into the water, then dump out that water and add another ingrident to make it creamy. Why cut out the middle man? This absorption-style pasta can be as simple or as complicated as you want it. Stiring in some tomato sauce at the end always works, here I added a mushroom and onion mix.

Mushroom Absorption-Style Pasta

Pasta

1 cup Macaroni

1.75 cups stock

2 cloves garlic, minced
Topping

Oil and butter

1 onion, diced

100gm mushrooms, chopped

Spices (oregano, chili flakes, cumin)

1 teaspoon soy sauce
Sautée the garlic and pasta in a little oil on high and then add the stock. Keep cooking for your standard pasta cooking time. Meanwhile, sautée the onions in a little oil for a couple of minutes. Add the mushrooms with a little butter. Add the soy sauce and the spices, continue to cook until the pasta is ready. Dump the onion and mushroom mixture into the pasta pot, stir and serve.

Serves 1 hungry person, or not as the main dish for 2.

I wasn't blown away by this particular version, but the absorption pasta technique is great at making really creamy pasta. The 1.75:1 stock:pasta ratio seems pretty scaleable.