I've bean cooking

Bad pun intended.

Given that it's already mid-January, I should probably write my annual post of 10 restaurants I'd like to go to at some point this year. (You can find the 2009 list here and 2008 here. I did pretty well last year -- made it to every place on the list except Quince and Avatar's Punjabi Burritos.)

But before I begin, I'd like to talk about my other food-related goals for 2010 -- goals that involve actually cooking instead of just eating.

I'm no Julie Powell, and the last thing I want to do is copy the Julie/Julia Project. (By the way, did anyone else find Julie extremely whiny, both in the book and in the movie? Dear god, I wanted to smack her.) But I do want to use my cookbooks more. And actually learn from them. I have a bad habit of flipping through cookbooks, picking one recipe and making only that recipe over and over again -- regardless of what else is in the book. I'm also guilty of buying cookbooks and never using them -- ever.

So this year, I am attempting to learn from two James Peterson books: Splendid Soups and Baking. Both seem to provide a good foundation for technique, and Peterson does a great job of explaining why things are done, instead of just telling you what to do.

Yesterday I actually soaked dry beans and made Peterson's pasta e fagioli recipe. This was huge for me -- I never use dry beans (with the exception of lentils, of course, which is how I survived grad school). Dry beans have always intimidated me because I thought they required so much planning. But the truth is, they really don't. And cooking them didn't take hours and hours, either -- just 1.5 hours, and salt thrown in at the right time (about 30 minutes into cooking).

And the soup was pretty easy. (The most painstaking part was peeling and seeding the tomatoes.) And puréeing the beans before adding them to the soup was another learning experience for me -- it's a great way to make soup creamy without actually adding cream (and all the accompanying fattiness).

The result was delicious -- even better today for lunch. I'll have to try this recipe again in the summertime, when tomatoes are actually in season.

Next on the Peterson educational agenda: Pastry dough. I'd love to learn how to make it from scratch.

(And now this post is officially too long, so the restaurant list is going to have to wait yet one more day.)