I was out at the bar with a couple of handsome young men last night, and the discussion was serious -- knife fighting, the relative merits of Kanye West, how everyone at the gym is doing their deadlifts wrong, the imminent zombie invasion, and, finally, how F is really seriously worried about money these days and doesn't know how he's going to make it through the next couple of months without ending up in hock.
Me being me, I immediately asked him whether he eats out all the time.
"Well, yeah," he said.
B and I tut-tutted. "Gotta cut it out, man. Gotta cook. Seriously. Fastest way to save money."
F looked indignant. "I USED to cook all the time when I had cash. I can fry up a mean steak, and I used to do this salmon with almonds and panko crumbs..."
B, who eats peanut-butter sandwiches for lunch every day so he can afford beer, said "PANKO CRUMBS? Oh what's up, Moneybags?"
"Sorry pal, steak is not happening if you're poor," I said. "Neither is the salmon, realistically. It is rice and beans and tuna for you."
"Yeah," B said. "Get some rice and beans. Mix 'em up with taco sauce you swiped from Taco Cabana and it's not bad. Frozen corn is good in there too, and cheese if you can swing it--"
"B, stop it, you're making me really fucking depressed," I said.
"Don't you go all Julia Child on us, this is bachelor food," B said.
"Being a bachelor is no excuse to eat dismal slop," I said. "Look guys, the solution to your problems of both palate and budget is soup."
They blinked at me.
"Soup encompasses many things," I continued. "It can be soup, or it can be stew, or chili, or curry, or any number of things because the technique is identical. The only things that vary are the ingredients, the seasonings, and the amount of liquid. If you know how to make soup you can make anything."
"Do edify us," F said.
"Well, you start with a mirepoix--"
"Mire-whatnow?" said B.
"Carrots, celery and onion, and sometimes garlic depending. All soup will start with at least one and sometimes all of these. You chop them up, then you heat some oil in the bottom of a pot, put in your mirepoix, and cook it partially covered until it's wilted down. Then you put in your liquid, which can be plain water although I swear by Better than Bouillon vegetable base to jazz things up, and any other stuff that needs cooking in liquid -- beans, other vegetables, you name it. Also your herbs and spices and stuff. Then you simmer it all together until it tastes good. Voila."
The conversation turned to Soups We Have Known. I mentioned my trick of putting canned pumpkin in with lentils, for color and fiber, and the boys were skeptical. B said that he was on a camping trip with our friend M one time, and she made soup for dinner and everyone was nervous because there was a lot of drinking going on and soup seemed insufficiently hefty to soak up the whiskey, but the soup turned out to be delicious and ribsticking and hearty and did the trick. (Of course B couldn't remember what was in it.) And I told F that for the price of two slices of Whole Foods pizza, he could easily produce enough black bean soup to feed himself lunch for a week. F said, meditatively, that black bean soup actually sounded really good.
Black bean soup IS really good. It's really good and it's super-cheap, because the ingredients are cheap to begin with and because, unlike most soups, the less stuff you put in it the better it is. It keeps very well, improves as it sits and gets along well with all manner of starches, from tortillas to rice, though I like it with polenta (recipe follows.) It's also good for you.
So here you go, F.
Take a big onion and as much garlic as you like (I recommend abusing your garlic privileges), chop the onion and mince the garlic, and sweat both over medium heat in a couple tablespoons of oil in the bottom of a partially-covered soup pot for about 5 minutes or as long as it takes the onion to go limp and translucent. To this you add one 12-or-14-ounce can of crushed tomatoes with juice, 6 cups of water or broth (made with Better than Bouillon or plain old bouillon cubes), and 3 cans of black beans with their liquid. (You can also use a pound of dry beans for this, and it will be cheaper and probably tastier, but will have to cook for much longer -- like two hours.) Set the heat on low and simmer, stirring when it occurs to you, for about half an hour or until everything is starting to look the same in there. Then taste it, add salt if necessary (it probably will be) and pepper, and allow to cool. You'll want to puree this, and the best tool for the job is an immersion blender, though you can use the regular old blender (just be careful). Add more liquid if it gets too stiff, and you're done.
Nice things to add with the water or broth are a couple tablespoons of tomato paste, a big canned chipotle chile minced up, a bay leaf, some thyme, and/or (my personal favorite) a teaspoon of anise seeds. But they are not necessary.
Now for the polenta: forget everything you've heard about polenta. It is time-consuming but not difficult or labor-intensive, and if you want to nest tasks you can get it started before the soup. Put 8 cups of heavily-salted water on to boil in a large saucepan, and once the water is good and boiling slowly sprinkle in 2 cups of regular cornmeal, stirring all the while. The sprinkling must be done carefully and the stirring must be constant, or the polenta will be lumpy, but who really gives a shit about a lump here and there, right? Once all the cornmeal is in the pot, drop the heat to the lowest possible setting and let the polenta simmer for 45 minutes. By "simmer" I mean "allow to blurp ominously about once every thirty seconds"; any hotter and it'll burn. Stir once in awhile but don't disturb the crust on the bottom. The polenta will be an edible consistency long before 45 minutes are up, but the long simmer is necessary to make it taste like anything. Add pepper before you eat it.
So you have your soup and your polenta and that's all you need, but you can also put yogurt or sour cream on there, and chopped cilantro. This will cost you about seven dollars for six or eight servings, and when you're sick of black bean soup there is lentil soup, with or without pumpkin, and minestrone, and and and...
