aiyah :: 07.18.01


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july 18, 2001
let's cook

As promised to a few readers, some sort of culinary thing shown on aiyah.net today:

prep work is the hardest part.

Today I'm gonna cook something for all you folks in virtual land. Cook Cuban Black Bean Soup that is. There's (this is where you look at the picture above) the ingredients before cooking:

olive oil - about 2-3 tbs.
black beans - that have soaked overnight in a lot of water, washed and drained, roughly 2 cups before soaking
chicken stock - 4 cups aka 32 oz.
diced green chiles - 8 oz. in total
chopped up ham - a good amount because you need the flavor
chopped garlic - 3 to 4 cloves
chopped onion - 1 large
chopped bell pepper - 1 large
chopped tomato - 1 large or 2 medium
chopped celery - 3 stalks
oregano, cumin and thyme - 1.5 tsp, 1.5 tsp and .5 tsp respectively
water - 2 cups or so

And here we go (mouse over for insightful words of wisdom from me):

first, you heat some olive oil over med. high heat and sweat out the garlic, onions and bell peppers. after you sweated those damn things for a good 5-7 minutes, you pour in all the chicken stock. free range chicken stock used here because it's healthier. ham thrown in. you can use bacon, ham hocks. i just can't that's all.

in goes the green chiles. yum. gives it that oh so south of the border taste. :P the spices all chucked in at the same time. you'll need salt to taste later. and why is my hand looking like a ham hock? throw in 2 cups of wawa and bring to a boil before turning it down to a simmer.

While the grub is simmering away, let's chat shall we?

I was thinking the other day how the dirtiest thing in the bathroom is probably not the toilet bowl itself but the....toilet HANDLE. Humor me for a sec and think about this. Everyone flushes the toilet after they poop or piss right? Well, almost everyone. But everyone who presses on that handle hasn't washed their hands yet right? This probably explains why I've seen some women flush the toilet with their foot instead of their hands - in that pseudo king fu, leg up in the air pose.. Er...yeah. And that also explains how come many of the toilets I've seen in Asia have that foot pedal flusher thingy instead of the traditional press-o-flusher handle.

Alrighty, it's 2 hours later and time to whip out the gigantic vibrator to work this baby:

ideally, use a hand held blender and blend up to about 70-80 percent of the stuff in there. gotta leave some chunky stuff to gnaw on when you eat it right? if you want a smoother soup, then blend it more. i don't really give a fuck. ok, see how it's blending nicely here? smells good. you should add salt here to taste. but don't make it too salty. that would suck royally. here's the final result.

I know, the color of the soup looks like poi. ;P But the cam couldn't pick up the true color of it in the end. And of course it's not going to be a pretty color since we started off with black beans you fool. Even though it doesn't look palatable, it tastes fuckin awesome. The consistency should be slightly thickened but not too thick - it's a soup afterall. To garnish, you should preferably add some chopped hard boiled eggs, a lil bit of chopped tomatoes and maybe some green onions. I didn't garnish mine well at all. That's probably because I was hungry and just wanted to dig in. Some other ideas to garnish would be to add: chopped onions, some shredded cheese and perhaps some yummy tortilla chips on the side. Since it's not a Mexican dish, I wouldn't do a fuckin nacho fest or anything.

Anyway, let me know if any of you try this. Maybe if you invite me to a potluck, I'll make this for you instead.

Don't you guys just learn so fuckin much on my site? Maybe next time I'll up the difficulty level and do something really hard.

I'm out.