Soup

Autumn has arrived in Adelaide and it’s brought winter with it. This last week has been very cold, especially at night. This is perfect weather for staying inside and eating soup. I’m making soup right now!

Soup is really easy to make. As I tweeted 20 minutes ago:

my soup recipe: boil some stuff in water & stock for a couple of hours. Put it through a blender. Add more stuff & put in slow cooker.

And that’s about it. The soup that I’m making now consists of chicken, leeks, sweet corn and potatoes. The liquid it’s boiling in is chicken stock, water and a cup of milk (for creaminess). Sometimes I make my own stock (which is also easy: boil chicken bones for a few hours, then take the bones out of the pot) but this time I’m using one of those cartons you can get from the supermarket.

BTW the photo at the top of this post is not the soup I’m making at the moment. As with a lot of photos I use, it’s from the Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr. The attribution is in the alt text and the link if you click on the photo. The page this one links to includes the recipe which I plan to try some day.

edited to add: the soup is now in the slow cooker on low to keep it warm. It tastes perfect, just like a canned one we had a few weeks ago but without the industrial taste so many ready-to-eat foods have.

Sunday tutorials – Cooking videos.

As part of my preparation for uni this year, I’ve done a lot of multimedia tutorials online. I’ve found this habit is now expanding into other areas. For example, this morning I went looking for a video tutorial on how to poach an egg.

I decided that each Sunday I will share five tutorials from the last week. Except this week, because I haven’t been keeping a record of what tutorials I do and which ones are useful. So for this first one, I spent some time on Youtube and rediscovered five cooking videos which have been useful to me in the past… well, rediscovered four videos, and discovered one.

The first one is how to poach an egg. I felt like a poached egg for breakfast today, but had never done it before. So I asked Google. Several videos came up, but this is the most straightforward. Note he says you should cook the egg for 10 minutes, that iw for a firm yolk. Mine had firm whites and a runny yolk after 2-3 minutes.

Cooking with fresh garlic tastes so much better than garlic from a jar or powder.

Onion are hard to chop without crying. Gordon Ramsay’s method works nicely.

In winter I make lots of soups, and stock can be expensive. So you can make your own.

Many years ago, somebody showed me this method for telling if a steak is done. I prefer to poke the steak with a pair of tongs rather than my finger.

So there we go, you can now cook a steak with onion and garlic soup and a poached egg. (hold the spam)

Cooking: Bolognese

One of my 2010 projects was “learn to cook”. Well, more than just the most basic of basics. Here is a Bolognese recipe based on one I heard on the radio.

Ingredients

• beef mince, 500 grams (actually a 50/50 mix of pork and veal works best, but beef is cheaper)
• tomatoes: one can crushed, one can peeled, maybe a few fresh ones (ideally you’d use all fresh and put them through the food processor, using cans saves time and is a little cheaper)
• tomato paste, one 250 gram jar
• brown onions, one or two
• bacon, one rasher
• olive oil, around 2-3 teaspoons (I never measured this, I just pour it straight from the bottle)
• beef stock, one cup
• red wine, one cup (I’ve found shiraz (AKA sirrah) or blends containing it taste best)
• herbs (so far I’ve been using “Italian Herb Mix” and minced garlic from the supermarket. Eventually I’ll use my own fresh stuff from the garden)
• capsicum, one medium
• mushrooms, two or three

Method

• In a large saucepan, heat the olive oil on medium.
• Remove rind and fat from the bacon and chop it. Add it to the saucepan.
• Chop the onion and add it to the saucepan.
• Crumble the mince into the saucepan. Wash hands (because handling raw meat is yucky)
• Chop and add mushroom, capsicum and fresh tomatoes.
• When the mince is browned, turn the heat down to low.
• Add canned tomatoes, tomato paste, stock and wine.
• Add a glass of water.
• Add herbs to taste.
• Let simmer uncovered until it’s thick enough. Stir every few minutes so the stuff at the bottom doesn’t burn and stick to the pan.
• Turn the heat off and cook your favourite pasta. There will be enough heat in the saucepan that it will stay warm while the pasta cooks.

And there you go. I guess this is enough to serve 4-8 people. With two of us we go back for seconds, then there’s still enough to fill three or four Tupperware containers that go into the fridge and freezer for later use.

For a vegetarian option, you could leave out the bacon, swap the mince for mushrooms and/or beans and use vegetable stock instead of beef stock.

52Books: The Organic Suburbanite

For first book number 1 of 52, I read The Organic Suburbanite by Warren Schultz. I received the book for Christmas from my brother John and his partner Cass (who run All the rest have thirty-one which is turning out to be a useful and entertaining green living blog).

The book is a guide to living the “American dream” lifestyle of a big house in the suburbs without being so damaging to the environment. That kind of book can be intimidating, but this one isn’t. It’s obviously written for the novice. The book is divided into three sections: The Organic Suburbanite at Home (includes kitchen, laundry and cleaning tips), Around the Suburban Yard (maintenance of paths, decks, cars and swimming pools), and Suburban Lawns and Gardens (gardening). I live in a rented apartment so two-thirds of the advice simply does not apply to me. It is still good, but I would recommend apartment dwellers pick up one of the many eco-cleaning books out there instead. The book is written in plain language, which makes a change from a lot of these kinds of books. Also, use of colours, spacious layout and photos of 1950s American suburbia make it a joy to read.

All in all, it’s worth having on the environmentally friendly bookshelf.

2010 Projects

I don’t really do new years resolutions, as nobody ever really keeps them. When you’re ready to make a change, you will, no matter what the calendar says.

Having said that, I have been planning a few projects which just happen to be ready to start in January:

• Start a garden. This will pose a few challenges on its own. We are renting an upstairs flat, but there is a paved courtyard downstairs. The only people who go in there are electricity meter readers and people visiting us. My plan is to (1) get rid of the weeds growing through cracks in the pavers then (2) get some pots and start growing things.
• Go open source. I have this machine dual-booting Windows XP and Linux Mint, but I end up using Windows most of the time. I’m going to back up all my data, then convert this machine to run only Linux.
• Get my weight down to 85kg. I’m currently 102kg. BMI calculations say I should weight 75kg, but when I was at my fittest and healthiest I weight 85. I may have failed the pool body fitness challenge but I have been losing half a kilogram a week for the last month (due to having protein shakes for breakfast). I will achieve this goal by eating healthier and getting exercise. As soon as this post is up I’m getting on the stationary bicycle.
• Start my own personal archive – categorise and label all photos, documents, etc. that I have lying around. This will involve sorting all the digital photos on this computer and printing the best to put into albums. It also means organising my filing cabinet so I can find things. And getting a scanner so everything can be digitised. And coming up with an off site back up of the digital bit. And documenting family events. Eventually I hope to digitise the family history archive and add that too.
• Work out what’s going on with uni, and finish off my degree. I’ve been doing what was meant to be a 3 year degree since 2002. This is the year (or maybe early 2011) I’ll finally finish it off.
• Use the random computer parts lying around here to build a file server. Then all my files should be easily available on the LAN.
• Knit a decent pair of socks. At the moment I’m in the learning stage, making socks that at least resemble socks but they’re not great.
• Start writing a book of some sort. I have a few ideas but I don’t want to share until it’s ready.
• Move this blog to some other hosting with its own domain. That way it will still exist if anything happens to wordpress.com.
• Blog at least three times a week. I know when I started I wanted to do every day, then twice a week, and it’s actually been more like once a fortnight.
• Learn to cook more. I know the basics, but I need more techniques and recipes. I’m getting bored of eating the same stuff every week.

So there it is… my non-resolution list of things I want to achieve in 2010.