Foods in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

I was boiling up a pot of hambone broth and was on the well-trodden track toward making black bean soup out of it when I opened the cupboard door and saw the big bag of split peas sitting atop the food-grade bucket I keep the black beans in. Yes! Last time the split pea soup was genius!

And after the great flurry of onions and carrots and getting the soup underway I remembered that it was actually a specific recipe I had found for split pea soup that was genius last time. We’ll see how the freehand version compares. I am very optimistic.

I cook very confidently within my little round. It helps that I’m an eat-anything sort of person. That doesn’t mean I don’t aim at spectacular heights of deliciousness, but outcomes aren’t a stress issue. I don’t know, it doesn’t occur to me to worry in the kitchen. Granted, I don’t do much that is really difficult.

We’ve run out of garlic. We’re going to try to double the amount we plant next fall. We grow Music, which is just a joy and comes out with great big cloves. I use a lot of garlic when we have it. The trick where you squash the cloves with the flat of a knife to slip off the skins has been a great help. But also if I get in a hurry our garlic crusher has little bumps that go through its holes so I can crush the garlic skin-on. It works well enough.

The days are - slowly, with many disappointing reversions - getting warmer and sunnier, all the plants are waking, this is our spring, and part of it for me is suddenly thinking about new recipes and about old favorites that I haven’t cooked in a while. For me that sort of thinking does not work when it’s late autumn going into winter. I cling to the central tentpoles then, and the rarer treats are things that I used to cook way back in the irretrievable times when I was young and fresh, even if it was just six months earlier. In the winter I’m not able to seriously take up the question of whether it’s time to cook Dorinda Hafner’s okro stew again. Now it seems just a shopping trip away.

What’s loosening my mood as I type now is that that pot of soup on the stove is absolutely gigantic. This relieves a certain kind of low-level stress. I’m type two diabetic, and many foods aren’t great for keeping my blood sugar from skyrocketing; I shop for myself with this very much in mind, but many of the foods that are good in this respect are the sort of things that eat up pretty quickly, particularly if I like them, so that my meals then wander onto other stuff between shopping expeditions, which does weigh on me in a distant way. (Because nothing proliferates so promiscuously as an exception.) This hambone soup is going to kick the can down the road by as much as a week. One less thing to bend my brain on. Thank goodness for refrigerators.

I’ve had to dial back on fruit a bit. (I used to bring home a sack of navel oranges now and then, and boy did one of those spike the results when my diabetes was first detected.) My excursions in that direction are now few and focused and treasured, and I have lately come to truly appreciate a ripe pineapple, sliced up into juicy slabs that I eat one by one over the course of a week. I can’t believe how sweet pineapples can be.

The split pea soup is ready.

Good grief, that’s smooth. Things are all right here.

I mentioned okro stew, so I’ll paste the recipe out of my files, the way I have it typed up:

OKRO STEW

I first ran across this Ghanaian recipe in the book A Taste Of Africa, by Dorinda Hafner. They were having a sale of it on a table in (I think) Import Plaza (?), and I saw her smile on the cover, and you buy a cookbook from a cook who is smiling like that. You just do. I always recommend the book, but in truth I’ve only ever tried the one recipe out of it, Okro Stew on page 20… or rather my customization of it because I couldn’t find all the precise ingredients. The substitutions worked… God it’s good!!!! :o)
Here’s the recipe:

400 g (13 0z.) okra
300 mL (1/2 pt.) vegetable oil, pref. palm oil or if not then stir 10 g. (2 teaspoons) of turmeric in with the oil
3-4 medium onions, finely chopped
2 medium eggplants, peeled and finely diced
50 g. ( 1 1/2 oz.) root ginger, grated
1-4 red chillies (hot peppers, it’s talking about cayennes or the like), finely chopped (optional)
4 large ripe tomatoes, blanched, peeled and mashed or 200 g, (6 1/2 oz.) canned tomatoes, mashed
150 g ( 5 oz.) dried prawns or shrimp
30 g. (I oz) of salted dried fish, any
150 g (5 oz.) of diced smoked ham
Optional: small piece of cured salted beef?

Slice okra into thin rounds about 1/2 in. in diameter. Have everything ready to go, diced/chopped, etc. before starting.

In large heavy saucepan, fry onions in oil until they are light brown. Stirring all the time, with 3 minutes simmering time between each addition, add okra, eggplants, ginger, chillies, and mashed tomato in that order. Careful, may burn, so stir constantly throughout. (Seriously, constantly. You will get a bicep. - Alex)

Simmer for 10 minutes on low heat. Add the meat/shrimp/fish etc. Simmer for a further 10-15 minutes.

My own substitutions/comments:
I couldn’t find dried prawns so I substituted 3 times the weight in frozen shrimp/prawns.
Be careful, the turmeric/oil mix will stain Formica bright yellow; I found out by experiment. This can be troublesome (you can leave the turmeric out if you want, it’s just for looks).
Once in a crazed mood I substituted chopped apples for the chopped eggplant, volume for volume; it was nice, just sweeter.
I’d recommend treating the chillies as non-optional the first time and then seeing if you want to keep them in future; the flavors blend well.
I’ve still never tried it with the salted dried fish, though I want to. … Dang, I’m drooling.
A baked Pearl yam is great on the side.

Last updated April 07, 2024