Stoup

I decided to take another cue from the Mennonite girls who can cook... This time, a lentil and sweet potato chili. ...And we have another winner! :-)

It's a very colorful dish, visually, and it has a lot of flavor. We decided that it's really more like a soup or a stew than a chili, however (although you can taste the chili element, too), so we decided to compromise and call it "stoup". We would have called it "stewp", but that already exists in the Lulich family.

Basically, you start with oil in a large pot - then add chopped up onions, celery, and carrots (a "mirepoix") with a bunch of spices (cumin, cinnamon, nutmeg, chili powder, red crushed peppers, salt & pepper). Then add the chopped up sweet potatoes, lentils, diced tomatoes and tomato paste, black beans, and broth (we used chicken broth). Bring to a boil, then let it simmer about half an hour until the potatoes are nice and soft. Voila! Guten Appetit! We think it will make 6 or more bowls-full.

Soup!

Chef Steven back at it again! This evening I found a recipe for "creamy potato leek soup" that sounded good, and since we had most of the ingredients already I decided to try it. I had to get some leek and onion at the store, but that's pretty inexpensive.

So.... First, I melted butter in a large pot, then added two cinnamon sticks (yes, cinnamon sticks), a whole chopped leek and a medium chopped onion. Let those cook together a little bit. Meanwhile I cut up most of our remaining potatoes (which were growing sprouts and needed to be used), then added those to the pot, along with two cans of chicken broth. Let that boil, then remove the cinnamon sticks and let the soup simmer and cook down a while. When the potato pieces were getting pretty soft, I used a mashed potato masher to mash them a make the soup more creamy. I was surprised at how much effect this had on the soup's thickness - it was rather thin to begin with but then seemed thicker after the potatoes were mashed. I added some sour cream to help the creaminess, plus a pinch of marjoram, basil, and rosemary. Plus salt and pepper of course. In the end I decided I needed to add a little more dairy, but since I was out of sour cream I used milk - about a quarter cup, I think.

The result was a very tasty creamy soup. I was afraid I had gone overboard with the rosemary/basil/marjoram, but M liked the spiciness of the soup. :-) And it made quite a bit. We each had one and a half rather large bowls, and I think there are another 3 or 4 large bowls left. I'm not that good at estimating such things, however....so there might be even more! :-9

Our garden is starting to grow! We planted some serrano chili plants in a pot on the windowsill, and about 7 or 8 of those have sprouted. We also planted 5 kinds of herbs in two pots on the window sill - one of the herbs is sprouted and doing really well - we don't remember which one it is, though! :-} When it grows up I think it will become clear. I think this was the herb that was planted at half the depth of the others, so perhaps we'll start getting some other herbs in the next few days. :-) Looking forward to using them in our cooking! It will especially be fun when B & R come out in June and we can use the herbs in our Iron Chef competition.... :-)

Anyway - creamy potato leek soup. Good stuff.

p.s. I got the recipe (and then tweaked it) from a blog that I found when googling things to cook - it's called "Mennonite girls can cook".

Houston, We Have a Winner...

And the verdict is in.... This coconut milk white sauce over homemade pasta and spiced chicken is really good. :-)

Special Pasta Sauce

Chef Steven here again and back in action! Tonight's challenge: A pasta sauce to go over the last of the homemade pasta. We have no milk, no tomatoes, no tomato paste, etc. What we do have is butter, flour, coconut milk, and frozen boneless chicken. :-)

So, we'll see how it turns out. First, I heated some olive oil in a sauce pan, then added garlic cubes, salt, pepper, some marjoram and rosemary. After thawing the chicken in the microwave, I added it to the oil & spices and cooked both sides until a nice golden brown. :-) I then put the chicken in the oven at 375 degrees for 25 minutes. I might need to leave it in another 5 or 10 minutes longer.

In the meantime, I made a roux (don't know if that's spelled right) - butter and flour, right? Well, that's what I did. :-) I think I saw someone add milk to make a white sauce, but since I didn't have milk I added a small can of coconut milk. Turns out that coconut milk is pretty potent, and relatively thick. So I stirred in some water until it got to a nice thin consistency. Once it was thin enough, it was ready for me to add some parmesan cheese (from a can) and melt it in. I also added some salt and pepper. It's now waiting on low heat. It smells really good, but it's pretty rich. Good thing it's going over pasta! And the chicken, when it was on the stove top, smelled pretty light, so that might help cut some of the richness.

When the chicken is done, I'm going to slice it up and toss it with the sauce and some pasta. Then I'll see how it turned out! :-)

Up Next, on Iron Chef Steven....

This afternoon M and I watched another Iron Chef America episode. This time Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto made a waffle with the secret ingredient: curry.

Intrigued, I decided to try making my own curry waffles. So I did! I took the recipe for whole grain waffles that M and I have been using, and substituted a little flour with some curry and cinnamon. Then I made the waffles in the usual way. Also following in the Iron Chef's footsteps, I made my own syrup to go with it. Well, sort of. I combined a little water, some imitation maple syrup, and some honey in a small pot and cooked it down a bit on the stove top. This was way too sweet, so I added a little curry powder (Iron Chef Morimoto had also put curry powder in his syrup). I also sprinkled some powdered sugar on top of the waffle. When all is said and done, it's actually a pretty good dish. A little different for waffles, but not too different. Morimoto served ice cream on the side, and I bet that's a pretty good combination. I'm thinking in particular of cinnamon ice cream... Mmmmm... :-)

Pasta!!!

This evening I made pasta. Fetticine, to be precise. Home-made. From scratch. M and I had been talking a few days ago about making pasta from scratch. I really wanted to do it (I've been watching too many Iron Chef America episodes lately :-P), and we were curious if we could save money by making our own pasta vs. buying dried pasta in the store. One thing we weren't sure about was how many meals we could get out of a single batch - just how much pasta could we make with a certain amount of flour and eggs (that's all it is). So while M is on overnight call tonight, after I cleaned up the kitchen (which I had let get into a sorry state) I decided to make my first attempt at pasta this evening.

So, armed with Iron Chef Mario Batalli's pasta recipe, a will to put my (non-existent) culinary talents to the test, and a grumbling stomach (not the best way to begin making pasta, it turns out), I set to it. 3.5 cups of flour, 6 large eggs. Mix it together, kneed it, kneed it some more, kneed it a little more. Let it rest for 20 minutes (good thing, I was tired of kneeding). Then start rolling it out and shaping it. We don't have a pasta roller, so it was the old fashioned rolling pin for me! ...and I thought kneeding was hard! I spent about an hour getting the pasta rolled out and cut into strips of linguini (that's what I thought I was making). When that was all done, I put some water on to boil. Then I realized I didn't have any tomato sauce or diced tomatoes or in fact any thing with which to make a tomato sauce. Oh no! Not deterred by this ginormous mountain of a roadblock, with heroic vim I turned to the only place a hero can turn to in a situation like this. Google. And there I found my solution! I found a recipe for no-tomato pasta sauce that featured cauliflower. Suddenly remembering that we have frozen bags of veggies in the freezer, including some with cauliflower, I whipped out a sauce pan and heated some olive oil. Then I added some garlic cubes and finally dumped the veggies in. Then some salt and pepper and tamoline chili powder (my current favorite experimental spice). I decided my "white sauce" wasn't white enough, or voluminous enough, so I added some milk. Brought that to a boil and then reduced the heat and let it simmer. (Actually, I was distracted for a moment and didn't notice that the sauce pan began boiling over - so now I have to clean the kitchen again. :-)) Then I started cooking the pasta! In the end, I had fetticine (not linguini) and way too little sauce for it all. Let's just say this: 6 large eggs and 3.5 cups of flour makes a lot of pasta. So I put a healthy helping in a bowl and then poured all the sauce on top, mixed it up, and this is my dinner. :-)

All in all, I have learned two important lessons from this adventure, and two very important lessons:

1. The first important lesson is that making pasta entirely by hand and with a rolling pin is hard work. And it's the rolling and cutting that takes the longest amount of time (I spent about 90 minutes making pasta - not counting the cooking), and of that 20 minutes were spent letting the dough sit, and about 60 minutes were spent rolling it out and cutting it).
2. The second important thing I learned is that pasta is actually pretty darn easy to make. There were moments when I really didn't think this pasta was going to turn out.

1. The first really important lession is that you shouldn't put all your cut pieces of pasta into a dry bowl while you cut up the rest. By the time I got to the cooking part, it had all stuck together pretty badly. This was one of those times when I thought it wasn't going to turn out, but in the end the stuck-together chunks seem to have become unstuck during the cooking.
2. The second really imprtant lession is that fresh home-made pasta is awesome. It tastes really good even plain and doesn't need any kind of sauce! Granted, I am eating my healthy helping with sauce, but that's partly because the sauce was already made. I will probably try a small bowl later tonight or tomorrow and see if I think it needs sauce or not.

So that's that, ladies and gentlemen. Today I took on Iron Chef Mario Batalli at his own game and came out the winner!

Poetry!

It's been a while since I last wrote a poem. I've been trying to write something for a while now, but nothing has been forthcoming. Well, as you know from my other entries, I'm reading Alexander Pope - and loving it! It has inspired me to try again - and this time I have something to show for it (a sonnet)!

An Allegory on Speech

Each one the image of his Language bears,
Which must by slow degrees be waked from Death:
The child must learn that speech begins with Breath,
As life itself, and ends with One who hears;

Then learn the sounds, in syllables arrayed,
Forgetting, too, the foreign sounds he knew.
Behold! He speaks! The syllables were true:
"Aga hateepoo" and "tagee dalate"!

Poor child! Vain sentences devoid of sense!
They have the form of words, yet not the power.
The Father coaxes gently, hour by hour,
Not lacking grace for childish innocence,

Until he learns the tongue of God for men,
And - full of meaning - whispers thus: "Amen."

A Hymn from a Poem?

There's a well-known hymn (And can it be that I should gain?, by Charles Wesley) with the following verse:

Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray—
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

It was written in 1738. Now compare this verse with a section of Alexander Pope's (1717) poem Eloisa to Abelard:

In these lone walls (their days eternal bound)
These moss-grown domes with spiry turrets crowned,
Where awful arches make a noonday night,
And dim windows shed a solemn light;
Thy eyes diffused a reconciling ray,
And gleams of glory brightened all the day.

The context is quite different - Eloisa is describing her convent with and without Peter Abelard being around, whereas Wesley is describing man's slavery to sin until God intervenes - but the language is remarkably similar!

Transitions from Medieval to Modern Thought

I read C. S. Lewis' book The Discarded Image some time ago and have found it very interesting and very useful ever since. For instance, I have recently read Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus, a couple of Shakespeare plays (with M!), I've been slowly working my way through Dante's Divine Comedy, and now I've been reading some poetry by Alexander Pope, including Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, and selections from Cavlin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. In each of these, I have run across statements that I would not correctly understand if I had not read Lewis' book.

For instance, when Calvin makes his argument for the immortality of the soul, he explicitly relies on the science of his day - that the earth is fixed and the spheres of the moon, sun, planets, and fixed stars are concentrically arranged about the earth; that heaven is beyond the sphere of the fixed stars; that below the sphere of the moon all things are corrupted and mortal, whereas above the sphere of the moon there is perfection and unchanging; that there are a few basic elements which have their natural places in the universe, either in the earth (the element "earth"), or on top of the earth ("water"), or above that ("air"), or above that ("fire"). Finally, above all these things comes "spirit", which has its natural place in heaven with God. As I understand it, Calvin basically argues that conscience is a flight of the soul to the judgement seat of God. If the soul flies upward to God in the heavens, it must be of an incorruptible, immortal nature since all corruptible and mortal things remain closer to the earth.

Almost 200 years later, Pope declares basically the same thing: "As into air the purer spirits flow, /And separate from their kindred dregs below; / So flew the soul to its congenial place". He describes the flight of the soul to its natural ("congenial") place as a process of chemical distillation, in which the body is left behind much like a residue in a chemical reaction.

Pope also, in Windsor Forest, describing the paradisical British Empire at peace, claims that "For me the balm shall bleed, and amber flow, / The corral redden, and the ruby glow, / The pearly shell its lucid globe infold, / And Phoebus warm the ripening ore to gold." What I want to point out here is the last line. Whether in an alchemical sense or a mythical sense, the medievals associated various planets (and the sun and moon) with various minerals in the earth. The moon was associated with silver, Jupiter with tin (I think), and so on. The sun (Phoebus) was associated with gold. It was thought by some that the sun would turn ordinary metals into gold if the conditions were right. Pope didn't necessarily agree with this, but he is happy to use the then-well-known imagery.

Another example from Pope comes from the Essay on Criticism (it's actually a poem), when he states "In some fair body thus the informing soul / With spirits feeds, with vigor fills the whole, / Each motion guides, and every nerve sustains; / Itself unseen, but in the effects, remains." Here now is an example of medieval physiology. There is a soul which forms in ("informs", not meaning "to give information" in this case) and sustains the body. It was thought that only humans have a soul; rather, that there were three aspects of the soul, and only humans have all three. The lowest aspect which animals and plants have is called the vegetable soul. The second part was the sensitive soul. The third part was the rational soul. Since I still don't know enough about these on my own, I will simply quote Lewis:

"The powers of Vegetable Soul are nutrition, growth, and propagation. It alone is present in plants. Sensitive Soul, which we find in animals, has these powers but has sentience in addition. It thus includes and goes beyond Vegetable Soul, so that a beast can be said to have two levels of soul, Sensitive and Vegetable [...]. Rational Soul similarly includes Vegetable and Sensitive, and adds reason. [...] The Rational Soul is sometimes called simply 'Reason', and the Sensitive Soul simply 'Sensuality'. [...] All three kinds of soul are immaterial."

So Pope says that the soul "informs" the body, feeding it with "spirits" and "vigor", guiding each motion and sustaining each nerve. The body was thought to contain several fluids which acted on the body to make it move and sense (these might be what Pope has in mind when he speaks of "spirits" and "vigor", or he may be referring to the Vegetable and Sensitive Souls, or there could be some mixture of both). For example, the four "humors" of the human body were blood, choler, phlegm, and melancholy.

As interesting as all this is, I have been surprised to find so much of this Medieval way of talking in Pope. Why? Because Pope lived in the generation after Newton. Pope was 40 years younger than Newton, and of course Newton is a pivotal figure in the history of science and how we look at the world. Newton can be thought of as the major transition from Medieval science to modern science. And yet old habits die hard, it seems. It takes some time for the new understanding to sink in, and even longer for the old verbal habits to die out. For instance, by demonstrating that the moon orbits the earth by means of the same force of gravity that causes an apple to fall from a tree, and that the same gravity causes the planets to orbit the sun - by demonstrating these things, Newton essentially declared that the nature of things in the heavens and the earth are the same. This completely exploded the notion that corruption was beneath the sphere of the moon and perfection above it. (Actually, this change in thinking was already underway 100 years before Newton, when Galileo observed the heavenly bodies with his telescope.)

And yet Pope can still say "So flew the soul to its congenial place."

This is interesting by itself, but I have another point... Well, its more of a question, or a hypothesis, or a suspicion. I haven't read a lot of Kant, but what I have read leads me to think that perhaps it is worth thinking of him as a transitional figure - bridging the Medieval and Modern worlds of philosophy. Granted, Kant lived another generation after Pope, but still close enough in time to Newton that I think he must have been very familiar with the Medieval way of thinking, or at least talking. I'm curious to try reading Kant from this perspective - to see if it makes him any easier too understand. (So far, he's hard.)

Anyway, those are just some thoughts. :-)