Old men should learn to cook.
I’m old, according to much of the world around me – most of 70 now – and I’ve been cooking for myself and others for the past 20 years and more.
It’s so easy to do.
It doesn’t have to be the sort of stuff you see on TV, where Gloria Multicleavage leans dangerously over a bevy of tiger-prawns wrapped in thinly-sliced half-baked Golden Eagle egg-whites (one wonders what would happen in she suddenly had the hiccups); or Christopher Fopworthy flaunts his leg of lamb (bone in), garnished with crushed Indian betel-nut, freshly-grated wombat dung and 2000-year-old fresh-felled kauri wood shavings.
Nor does it have to be something that takes three days to marinade and another fortnight to prepare and cook. And certainly it doesn’t need garnishes of the rare black poppy petals which have been irrigated daily with mares’ water and gathered by virgins in their ninth decade of life from the upper slopes of a north-facing Mongolian steppe.
Old men should always have a fruit bowl sprinkled with lemons and limes. They last a good while, they look colourful and therefore as though we’re eating healthy food, and the juice of half one or the other is useful to add to a wide variety of things. The open half gets swaddled in Glad-Wrap and put in the fridge for next time round. Like maybe a glass of gin and tonic early in the evening as dinner is contemplated.
Back to the lunchtime sardines.
If your taste is for something a bit more sparky, add a generous sprinkling of fine-ground black pepper and/or Worcester sauce. Spread the lot out over a couple of slices of Vogel bread – spelt and flaxseed is my favourite, but watch the littler black flax seeds. They have a knack of getting stuck in the ever-widening gaps between ageing teeth, or sliding deftly under false teeth plates. Either way they can be wondrously irritating.
But such a lunch meal is ideal. It’s nutritious, it’s fast, easy, and best of all it’s tasty. And you’re also left with a minimum of dirty dishes – fork for mixing up the brew, knife for spreading it, bread-and-butter plate, and a small mixing dish. Really, such small fry can sit quietly and unobtrusively in the sink and easily be amalgamated into the general wash-up after dinner. Don’t forget to rinse the sardine tin so it doesn’t stink in the rubbish three days later.
In the winter, us oldies often like something warming and filling and obviously nourishing for midday meals. This is especially true for those of us who grew up on the land and worked the morning hours outside in cold, often sodden and pretty miserable conditions. Coming back into the house and walking into that farm kitchen redolent with aromas of fresh scones and hot rich vegetable soup was only about half a rung down from heaven. I can often remember shrugging into a dry shirt, dry wool socks and another pair of old secondary school shorts, and heading for the big wooden dining room table. There was brown bread sliced in doorsteps on the bread-board, curls of peeled-off butter on a plate, and huge old soup spoons at the table settings. Those soup spoons may have been a hundred years old, but they held a seriously-good mouthful of hot fodder and they were given very strenuous workouts as Mum put great deep bowls of steaming soup in front of us. That soup, and lavishly buttered bread, together injected massive amounts of vitality and spirit back into chilled, flagging bodies. The soup was thick and rich and full of all sorts of chopped or grated vegies, and also often included finely shredded pieces of meat and pasta bits.
Get a good-sized pot, say six to eight inches deep and eight to ten inches across (us oldies are more comfortable dealing in feet and inches; you youngsters are smart enough to do the conversions yourselves), and fill it with about three inches of water. Set it on the stove on a moderate heat – about 3 is good. Then get your vegies lined up.
Anything that’s been wandering round the fridge for a few days, looking for a good home, is fair game – slightly wizen mushrooms, parsnips, onions and carrots that have started to sprout a little, slabs of pumpkin that are a bit soggy round the edges but solid inside, cauliflower and broccoli that are looking somewhat weary, and potatoes and/or kumara from the cupboard where they have been lurking for too long. This is a time for a general fridge clean-out, and the making of a new list for shopping next weekend. Ageing celery is a good add-in too, specially if it’s still got green leaf and a white heart. Both sections add a really nice subtle extra flavour to a nugget soup.
Peel those veggies which need it, and feed the peelings to the chooks if you have them, or biff them in the compost bin. At worst, spread them discreetly along the back of the flower garden.
With the round veggies (ie. carrots, parsnips, potatoes, kumara) carefully cut one side off and then lay that flat face down. Now you’ve got something that’s not going to slip out of your grasp and leave you with a two-inch cut in the finger that needs stitches … Cut longitudinal ¼-inch strips off the veggie, then turn each strip on its side, slice it length-wise again, and chop the resulting long thin pieces into little blocks. Chuck them in the pot as they build up on the chopping board.
Veggies such as broccoli and cauliflower can be reduced to small bits by simply attacking individual florets with a heavy-bladed sharp knife and reducing them to coarse rubble. First prune off any dark or manky bits and consign them to the compost. Pumpkin can be treated in a similar fashion to the round vegetables – peeled carefully with a heavy knife, then diced up into little bits.
It all takes time and patience to do this to start with, but after a while even us oldies become quite deft with a knife, especially if it’s as heavy-bladed gadget such as those fancy Japanese Ginsu choppers. There are plenty of less-costly versions on the market, and they’re well worth having.
Now for the cheating bits.
Well, maybe it’s not cheating all that much. I prefer to think of it as utilising available resources.
I add in things such as one or two Maggi Tom Yum soup mixes, which I find add a real zing.
If you’re not into spicy things, use one or two chicken-and-corn or creamy mushroom mixes instead. As well, early on I get perhaps 20 spaghetti sticks and break them up into one-inch bits. They swell up and add a thick richness to the brew. Of course, a goodly can of spiced chopped tomatoes in thick sauce is an absolute must, maybe complimented with a plentiful squirt of tomato sauce just to show willing. I just love to boost the brew by chucking in half a cup of frozen whole-kernel corn.
But stir it regularly, and turn the heat down after the first 45 minutes. This brew needs to be cooked slowly, stirred frequently, and allowed to let all the flavours permeate. Give it a good two hours, at least. In other words, put it together after breakfast and enjoy it hugely for lunch.
There are, of course, plenty of extra add-ins: red onions if you suffer from flatulence (which us oldies sometimes do), white onions if you prefer the spicier flavour and home eructations are not a problem; chopped swede or turnip; perhaps a third of a cup of rice, which helps thicken the mix; and our dear old Welsh special, the leek. I like adding leek to the brew. It gives it a bit of extra body, and it’s so easy to do. Prune off the base, then put a single longitudinal cut in the leek for about six inches of its lower portion. Slice this lower portion into semi-circular rings and add it to the soup. Good stuff!! Stow the rest in the fridge. It may do for another soup brew next week – it keeps very well.
Of course, if there are other special bits and pieces you like in your soup, fling them in. The idea is to create a concoction that you’re going to enjoy for lunch over most of the next week.
Now, the deal with a good soup is that it needs time to brew. It should be boiled very gently for 30 – 60 minutes, with very regular stirring to ensure it doesn’t stick and burn on the bottom. Burnt soup tastes revolting. Then turn the stove down so that the brew simmers – the longer the better – with regular stirring.
A spoonful should be sampled before the first bowl is ladelled out. Often it needs additional salt – sometimes as much as half teaspoonful.
But when it’s ready, and there’s a day of miserable rain and wind and cold and general unpleasantness outside the dining-room window, a steaming bowl of home-made soup, full of all the goodness Mother Earth can provide, is absolutely unbeatable. And it may have been produced for as little as $1 a generous serving.
Old men can produce that sort of thing without batting an eye.
By Kingsley Field