Brown bean soup (with bacon)

We're coming to the end of our winter, here. When the warmer weather comes along, I will share all manner of recipes for salads and fridge tarts. But, for now, it's definitely the weather for soups, casseroles and stews.

The story behind this recipe is one of those culturally revealing moments. I was working for a small town council (the same one mentioned in yesterday's recipe) and we had an end-of-year staff-and-families braai (barbecue). I should point out that it is the norm in South Africa for each person/family to bring their own meat to a barbecue, and for the man of the family to cook it on the communal fire. Since I was single, this presented a problem. There was no way on earth that a woman could join the men at the fire. Our job was to sit inside and gossip... and keep the beers coming. So several men offered to cook my meat for me. This presented another problem. I was 23 and not unattractive. None of the wives wanted their husbands cooking for me - that was grounds for suspicion of an affair (I did say that it was a small town).

But I had to eat. Inevitably, somebody grilled my steak for me, and inevitably his wife got the sulks.

In a pathetic attempt to make peace, I offered to share my marinade recipe with her (which I will share with you, too, at some point). B I G mistake! She snapped at me that she had plenty of recipes of her own, thank you very much, and several of the hatchet-faced wives nearby assured me that she was a brilliant cook. So I asked her to share some of her recipes with me.

Oddly enough, she did. This was one of them.

Ingredients

1 pkt sugar beans (or kidney beans if you can't get sugar beans where you are), soaked for several hours or overnight
250g rindless bacon, chopped
2 large onions, chopped
3 carrots, peeled and grated
3 litres water
10ml salt
Lemon pepper to taste
Marrow bones (if you struggle to come by these, use a small bit of neck of lamb or something with a bone)
125ml 4-in-1 soup mix or a combination of red lentils, pearl barley and split peas
2 bay leaves

Method

• Saute the onions and bacon until just done.
• Discard the water from the beans and add the beans to the saucepan.
• Add water and all other ingredients and simmer for about 2 hours - stirring occasionally - until the beans are soft. If you're using a pressure cooker, 40 minutes at pressure should do the trick.
• Serve with crusty bread.

Beef and bacon casserole

This is one of those recipes cut out of a magazine years ago and pasted into my recipe book. No family story. However, I'm a bit of a sucker for anything that calls for bacon... and I have passed that addiction on to my younger son who gives this recipe a decided thumbs up.

Oven temperature

160C

Ingredients
500g stewing steak, cubed
50ml flour
50ml oil
2 cloves garlic, crushed
200g baby onions/shallots, peeled and left whole
150g rindless back bacon, chopped
50ml tomato puree
5ml each dried oregano and dried rosemary (or about 15ml of fresh)
Pepper to taste (you won't need salt - there's enough in the bacon)
200ml red wine (or beef stock if you're teetotal)
285g can of creamed mushrooms

Method

• Coat meat in flour. 
• Heat oil in a large saucepan and brown meat.
• Add garlic, onions and bacon and saute for 5 minutes.
• Add tomato puree, herbs, pepper and wine and simmer uncovered until the sauce has reduced by half, stirring occasionally. This will probably take about an hour.
• Place meat mixture in ovenproof casserole dish, pour creamed mushrooms over.
• Stir gently, cover and bake until the meat is tender (about 35-40 minutes).
• Serve with rice and a lovely leafy salad (or some veg, if you prefer).

Pea and hock soup

This recipe comes from my BFF, Lynda Choice. Our two families spent a lot of time together when we were living in Cape Town. We also often wound up spontaneously eating together about once a week. Lynda and I would be working on something together, and get totally caught up in what we were doing. We would fetch the kids from school and go back to her house to carry on with whatever-it-was. At some point, I would phone John and tell him not to bother going home after work, but to come to the Choice's house instead. We would eat together, bath our kids together and then put our kids in Mark and Lynda's bed until we were ready to leave, at which point, we would carry two sleeping boys to the car and take them home.

I cannot begin to tell you how much I miss the easy fellowship of that relationship!

Watching Mark and Lynda in the kitchen together was most entertaining. They cooked as a tag team. Their kitchen was tiny, and neither of them is sylph-like, but they moved around each other like Morecambe and Wise in that most famous sketch. Lynda would get things going and Mark taste this, check on that, and make suggestions all the while ("Babe, this needs some X"; "Lyndie, are you going to put some Y in the such-and-such?"), which Lynda took completely in her stride. If John had tried that, I'd have probably whacked him over the head with a 'paplepel' (it translates as 'porridge spoon', but that does it no justice whatsoever).

Anyhoo, this is Lynda's pea and hock soup recipe (more or less), it makes a large quantity!

Ingredients

1 whole (small) smoked pork hock or eisbein - these are difficult to come by in the UK, and quite expensive, so I tend to have to make do with a bacon roast (about 1kg), but it is a poor substitute
Whole bag of green split peas (about 500g)
1 can peas (optional - I tend to leave these out)
125ml pearl barley
1 onion, chopped
1 large carrot, chopped
1litre chicken stock
2 bay leaves

Method

• Basically, it's a case of just bung everything in a large saucepan and cover generously with water - the peas will absorb a lot of water as they cook. You don't need any salt, because the meat is full of the stuff.
• Bring to the boil, reduce heat and simmer for a couple of hours, stirring occasionally. If you have a pressure cooker, about half an hour to 45 minutes at pressure will do the trick.
• Remove the meat joint, chop it up into bite-sized pieces and return them to the saucepan.
• Serve with crusty bread - preferably one of those tear-n-share loaves with bits of onion or sundried tomatoes in them.

Barbara's crustless savoury tart

This is one of my Mom's recipes. I realise she hasn't had much of a look-in on this blog so far. This is partly because she only came to enjoy cooking in her retirement, by which time I had long since left home. My Mom had the disadvantage of being the daughter of a good cook and then the daughter-in-law of an even better cook (nothing my Mom ever made was good enough for my Dad).

After my parents split up, my Mom was a single parent, working full time. Cooking was something to be done as quickly and easily as possible each evening after work, in order to get the kids fed on a severely limited budget. Our meals tended to be very ordinary.

These days, my Mom is much more daring. This recipe dates back to my teens. Back then, it was quite adventurous by my Mom's standards.

Double recipe, single dish

The recipe makes two tarts. You can halve it, of course. When I made it on this occasion, I put the whole double recipe into a single large pyrex dish and it worked just fine. I didn't even increase the time (but then, I have a fan-assisted oven, which makes a significant difference).

Oven temperature

180C

Ingredients

250g bacon, chopped
1 onion, chopped
2 thick slices of bread (about 2cm), crusts removed
625ml milk
30ml butter/marg
6 eggs
500ml grated cheese (mature cheddar works well)
1 tin corned beef (aka bully beef), mashed/chopped
5ml chopped parsley and/or chives
5ml English or Dijon mustard (optional - I leave this out)
salt and pepper to taste

Method

• Fry the bacon and onion together lightly. You shouldn't need oil - there is enough fat in bacon.
• Place the bread, milk and butter into a saucepan and boil gently for 5 minutes.Mash the bread and leave to cool.
• Beat the eggs in a large bowl.
• Stir in the cheese, bacon and onion, bread and milk mixture.
• Add remaining ingredients.
• Pour into two pie plates and bake for 30 minutes until the egg has set.
• Eat hot or cold with salads.

Notes:

Try using different meats. Frankfurters work really well, and if you have a few slices of ham left over from making the kids' sandwiches, chuck them in, too.
You could also try it with vegetables. It's a great way to deal with a few leftover vegetables. Broccoli works brilliantly, as do peas, grated carrot and chunks of potato. Just cook them lightly first.

Bacon and bean soup

Since I promised to do a soup that doesn't require a blender, I thought I'd better get right on it. We had this for supper last night.

First a note about bacon. If you're a bacon lover, it adds a delicious something extra to a wide range of soups. And you don't always need a lot of it, either - nor do you need the expensive, aesthetically pleasing rashers. Bear in mind, though, that bacon contains a lot of salt. So if you do add some to an existing recipe on a whim, adjust the salt levels accordingly. This recipe uses no salt at all, apart from what is already in the bacon.

I'm afraid the quantities in this recipe (as with most soups) are pretty inexact. I tend to use whatever I have in the house. I recommend you do the same.

Ingredients
1 pack of bacon, chopped if you like
1 onion, finely chopped
2 or 3 large carrots peeled and chopped or sliced (or hacked up willy-nilly)
250ml dried beans of your choice (see note about beans below)
250ml pearl barley
250ml green or brown lentils
125ml red lentils
2 bay leaves
1l chicken or vegetable stock
Water

Method
Rinse the beans and then place them in a large bowl full of water for several hours or overnight (or see note below). Pour off the water.

Then, hoick all the ingredients into a pressure cooker or saucepan. Make sure you add enough water, though, because the pulses will absorb a lot as they cook, and beans have a nasty tendency to stick to the bottom of the pot. This is particularly important if you're using an ordinary saucepan, because evaporation is a much bigger factor. Boil until all the pulses are soft. In my pressure cooker, this usually takes about 30 minutes at pressure.

If you're a more considerate cook than I am, you will remove the bay leaves before serving the soup. If not, you will simply serve it with a warning to 'watch out for extraneous plant matter' (I think my kids new the meaning of the word 'extraneous' before they went to nursery school).

You can serve with bread if you like, but I find this soup so filling, that I usually don't bother.

About those beans
I tend to use kidney beans, because it's what I grew up with, and because I like the colour. But, as you can see from today's picture, I might decide to try something different... or a combination of several different somethings. If you're in a hurry, you can use canned beans, but don't tell the purists I said so, okay? Opt for the 'no salt added' types. Oh, and not baked beans - just beans in water. If you're going this route, I would suggest at least two cans. Remember the '1 cup' of dried beans will turn into several cups of soaked beans, so you have to compensate.

This can be frozen. In fact, the soup we ate last night was prepared some weeks ago and then frozen. But you can only do that once. Once you have defrosted and reheated the soup, don't be tempted to re-freeze any left overs. If you have a large quantity to freeze, try splitting it up into smaller portions that you are more likely to use up on reheating.