An evening after Johnny left, master of the art farm, before the builder Brit Andy arrived, someone needed to do some cooking. Well, I decided to get cracking at it. I thought about a soup. A soup to end all soups, really, and it was fantastic. Unfortunately, one thought usually begets another, but not necessarily good ones. “Well Nick, how about we continue this soup? What do you think, we could add some beans and fire this thing up again tomorrow?” Nick enthusiastically agrees. Neither of us know what we are in for but we dump the can of white beans in nonetheless. We bring them to a short boil and assume that would suffice.
The next day, after a good few hours of laying stone and shoveling mortar, we get set for some nutritional uptake. However, the beans are strangely, “Al dente.” For those not culinarily savy enough to understand this, it means to the tooth - a bit of a crunch. It usually refers to pasta, and a pleasant texture, but with beans its not a good thing. Nick and I ended up sucking up the noodles, soup, and veggies, but we moved the compost bucket in front of the fire and spat the watermelon seed-like beans out of our mouths all afternoon long.
Moral of the Story: Cook your beans before you eat them.
Other culinary oddities here at the art farm include boiling bottles of red wine before drinking them. Most of the house sits at about 5 celsius, except around the fire. To get a bottle of Bordeaux to room temperature takes a bit of coaxing.
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