comfort food III

It was a difficult day all around.

Part of it was the worry about my aunt, part of it the concern over the nonfunctional drainpipe. ("Invisible drainpipe"? Sounds like a LOLcat). Part of it was just that everyone - at least among the students - was either in a foul or a subdued mood because it was pouring down rain today. (And also - high absenteeism.). And, not to go all TMI, but some problems with what one of my friends refers to as "ladystuff."

So I came home, not sure what to do for dinner. (That's a big issue, some nights. Some nights I don't mind taking an hour to cook something interesting and complex, but more and more, when I get home around 4 or 5 and plan to go to bed before 10 - there's just not enough time to do that, get caught up on grading, and have, you know, time for ME to be ME).

But tonight I lucked out. I remembered that I had made bean soup a couple weeks back and stashed a bunch in the freezer (because, as is typical of bean soup recipes, it made Mass Quantities).

This is actually an exceptionally good bean soup. It's roughly based on a recipe I have, but streamlined - you buy a bag of those "Hambeens" things (which is basically every kind of dry bean that is common, plus split peas and lentils). You soak a cup and a half or so of those in water overnight, rinse. Then you boil them up in water to which you add either a ham bone (if you can get one) or ham hocks (if a real ham bone is notforthcoming). You cut up an onion into it too, and dump in a can of chopped up tomatoes. At the very end of cooking, you dump in a cup or so of small pasta (I used some of the La Moderna alphabet noodles I talked about earlier). I also cut up a kielbasa in there because I didn't feel like pulling the fatty meat off the hocks.

I didn't season it well on the first go - the recipe I had called for just salt and pepper and that was too plain. When I reheated the first batch, I put in some cumin and a tiny bit of cayenne pepper and that made it a lot better.

Actually, it was really exceptionally good with the different seasonings. A "lot better" isn't a good enough descriptor.

It's actually not so much a SOUP as it is a stew - there's very little liquid. It's actually kind of like beans and rice, only with macaroni instead of rice (and, well, with kielbasa)

So for the reheat batch from the freezer, I used the same seasonings (I tend to freeze stuff unseasoned; it seems to keep better that way).

So as soon as that's done, I'm going to eat an early dinner (and I think I'm going to make a cup of hot Ovaltine and have some corn chips with the soup).

And then I'm going to go to bed and read. I started a new book on the Spartans (This! Is! Sparta!) the other night and it's pretty interesting; I'm not so much into military history but there's a fair amount in there about how the people lived - which does interest me a lot.

Ancient history is something that really intrigues me - especially Greece and Rome, because they're essentially the foundations of our culture, and yet, in many ways they were so different from us (in how they defined honor, and civic duty, and family vs. tribe).

I thought more on that Nerd Test thing - and you know, I'm not so surprised I scored high on history and literature. I've always loved both those topics and spend a lot of time learning about them "for fun." At one point in my college career I actually seriously considering majoring in Literature (probably British Literature) but after talking to a couple people who were majoring in it, I concluded that it had become far more political - and, at the school I was attending, far sillier, because there were profs who spouted things like, "Every interpretation, no matter how absurd it sounds, is equally valid" - than what I'd be able to tolerate.

Science was far more cut and dried and was less political. (Oh, science can BECOME politicized - just look at the whole global warming climate change issue - there is real science that supports that the climate IS changing, but it's far from as dogmatically clear how much, how caused, and what effects it will have as what some would want to believe. Even some of my own colleagues.). Science also isn't prone to the same kind of po-mo silliness that sometimes literature and culture-related things can devolve into.

So I like science for that. Actually, I like statistics even better - that's even MORE cut and dried, in many ways, than, say, ecology is. (But, then again: there's the frequentist paradigm vs. the Bayesian paradigm, so there's statistics' own controversy. I tend to teach more from a frequentist point of view but do introduce things like bootstrapping and jackknifing - not so much on the Bayesian because my grasp on that is at best tenuous - but I do like my students to know that there are different tools you can use).

Seriously, if I had to do it over again? I might become an engineer. (The math-and-materials kind, not the train-driver kind). Because that seems even more comfortingly cut-and-dried (at least to an outsider) than the life sciences do now.