making bean soup

 It's turned colder here (high today is only in the 60s, which is the coldest it's been since March) and I finally decided to make the bean soup I had been thinking about for a couple weeks:

This is from the Winnie-the-Pooh Cookbook - I got it for Christmas 1974 from friends of my family. It's a surprisingly complex cookbook for what looks like a kid's cookbook. 

I do alter the recipe slightly - I don't keep large quantities of dry beans of different kinds on hand, so I buy the "Hambeens" mix some stores sell (I had an old bag on the shelf - beans keep for years in their dry state, they just take longer to cook). 

Also, I halve the recipe, and even at that, it makes an enormous quantity. But with me eating more lunches at home....it will be nice to have something mostly ready to go; tomorrow night I might make a batch of homemade biscuits to eat with the heated up soup. 

 I suspect this soup would be good with a can of Ro-Tel for the tomatoes, but you'd have to make the full amount or have half a can of Ro-Tel left over. (I used tomato sauce and used one of the little cans I keep on hand) 

Marrowbones and even "ham bones with a little ham on them" are hard to come by these days so I'm cooking them with bacon and adding a sliced up (already cooked) kielbasa at the very end. And I used a "smokey flavored" steak seasoning to add a little flavor, since I don't put a lot of salt in my soup these days (I should put a LITTLE in, though, and some pepper)

That said, something happened that triggered a memory that made me slightly sad. 

When I was peeling the onion over the trash, a big piece of the papery skin fell on the floor, and suddenly remembered a story my mom told me about Paul, the cousin of mine who died just last week: when he was a small child, he was afraid of the papery skins on onions, so when my aunt (his mother) had cleaned a room and didn't want him going and playing in, she would put an onionskin in the doorway, and that would keep him out.

I hadn't thought of that for years. And now I did. 

 

My friend Wanda is right - a big part of mourning is not just mourning the person (I had sort of lost touch with Paul and his wife Barb) but also mourning the past times you had with them, because now you have the stark recognition those times can never come  again. I mean, I kind of knew they could not, but I remember when I was a kid and we'd go visit my grandma, and how all the various cousins would come by on different mornings (my grandma grew up on a farm and followed the old mealtimes: a very light early breakfast, and then a midmorning snack, almost like elevenses, and then often the big meal in the early afternoon and a light supper around 6 pm or later). And the midmorning meal - elevenses or second breakfast or whatever you want to call it - or maybe "coffee time" is better, she always made a percolator of coffee and would set out leftover pie or sweet rolls and a tin of cookies and once in a while had sandwich makings if a lot of people were coming. And people would come, sometimes everyone, sometimes different people on different days, and they would sit or stand (when all the chairs ran out) around her kitchen and talk and laugh and I remember the happy noise of an extended family sharing the same old jokes over again. 

And it does sometimes make being down here all by myself hard, especially now when I can't really get together with friends from church and some of my colleagues are mostly staying home and teaching from there.

The nice thing about the family gatherings is that you could participate even if you didn't talk, you were there, you heard, sometimes you laughed. Once in a while someone would ask me about how school was or something but mostly for a kind-of-shy kid it was nice just to sit and be around people without having to do the heavy lifting of carrying on a conversation with someone you honestly did not know that well. 

I graded a batch of exams this morning; I should eat some lunch and move on to the stats homeworks I need to grade. I am giving two more exams over the weekend but they don't technically close until tonight so I can grade those Monday.