An Historic Meal

I really just named that post that because I wanted to write "An Historic." Though this is pretty historic, nonetheless.

After realizing that sorbet was out of reach last night, I went out today and acquired a few new food processors - a blender and an ice cream maker. Yes, I'm really getting fancy now, it seems. I prepared a couple things pretty much simultaneously:

Strawberry Banana Smoothie

Ingredients:

Two bananas

Ten strawberries

3/4 cup of milk

3 Tablespoons of sugar

6 ice cubes

Wash and rinse the strawberries and cut their stems off. Toss everything into a blender and use the ice crush setting until the ice disintegrates a bit, then blend it all together nice and smooth. Easy, quick, and tasty!

Raspberry Sorbet

Ingredients:

Three cups raspberries

One cup sugar

Half cup water

One Tablespoon lemon juice

Put the water and sugar into a sauce pan and put it on a low simmer until the sugar melts. Stir it to allow the sugar to melt and dissolve into the water, and remove from heat to allow it to cool.

Throw the raspberries into the blender and puree them until they're reasonably smooth. Pour the result into a mesh strainer and crush the contents through the strainer into a bowl - a potato masher is probably best, but a measuring cup did in a pinch for me. Juice a single lemon for the juice and combine it with the raspberry juice, stirring it up a bit.

Get as much juice out of the raspberries as you can!

Combine the water and raspberry/lemon mixture and put it into the fridge to cool off. After it was reasonably cold, pour it into the ice cream maker and let it mix it up a little, and put the results into the freezer until it's nice and firm.

Finally, was dinner! We decided to make US Senate Bean Soup, famous for the fact that's it's been on the US Senate cafeteria menu for over a century. Unfortunately, apparently all the groceries in south Jersey seemed to be out of ham hocks, so we had to improvise.

US Senate Bean Soup

Ingredients:

Half a bag of navy beans

A dinner ham

Half a tablespoon of black pepper

A tablespoon of salt

Three stalks of celery

One small onion

One medium-sized potato

7 cups water

Two chopped cloves of garlic

A pinch of parsley

First of all, combine the Navy Beans with the water in a large pot. Heat it to boiling and then remove from heat. Leave the beans for an hour to let them soak.

While waiting for the beans to soak, chop up the celery, onion, potato, and garlic. Combine them all in a bowl with pepper and salt. When the beans have soaked enough, place the ham into the pot and put it over a simmering heat.

Hot Ham Water

Dana dicin' up the ham

Let this cook for about an hour and fifteen minutes, then remove the ham and dice it into small chunks. Put the diced ham into the bowl with the rest of the ingredients and mix them nicely before dumping them all into the pot with the beans and water. Continue to simmer the mixture for another half hour, or until the potatoes are nice and soft.

After the soup is done cooking, put in a pinch of parsley and a little more salt to taste. Ladle it out and enjoy! It was a lot better than even we expected. I got to eat the same soup the likes of JFK, Barack Obama, and Bob Dole ate! And Mitch McConnell... and John McCain... hmm.

Looks tasty

Anyway, I'd definitely recommend it!