WhimsyLand

(Still Life With Red Peppers and Miss Emily)

Well, I did make the Hearty Tuscan Bean Stew after all.  CI's recipe starts off by noting the area's residents' fame as mangiafagioli (bean eaters), but the test chef (Charles Kelsey) allowed as how he wasn't going to soak his beans in rainwater or put them in a used wine bottle to soften by a dying fire.  He did try a number of soaking methods, finding them roughly equivalent.  The biggest difference, which ended up with soft beans with creamy interiors was slow-cooking in a 250-degree oven.  The recipe calls for dried cannellini beans, pancetta, onion, celery, carrots, garlic, canned tomatoes, bay leaf and kale (or collard greens if you're into Soul Food).  I decided not to search around (or drive down to Boulder's Whole Foods) for the pancetta and just substituted 4 strips of bacon instead.  These I cut up and sautéed with a chopped large onion, 8 garlic cloves, celery sliced in perfect little quarter-moons, and carrots.  The carrots were the bagged little ones that Junie left me and worked fine.  The celery was the last few stalks of what I had in the vegetable crisper.  The bacon was the last of what was in the freezer (and has been for months).  Since I was trying to make this a really easy recipe with whatever I had around, I used the diced tomatoes that I usually have a dozen cans of anyway.  I intended using the same low-sodium low-fat chicken stock that I have lots of (in those handy cardboardish two-pint cartons).  I broke down and made a wine-and-kale run, though, picking up a nice Tuscan red that was on sale, and running into Safeway to grab a bunch of kale.  The CI recipe has you use about half and half water and stock, but I just used stock (hey, it's low-cal, low-fat and low-sodium, why use water?).  At this point, I had very little invested in time or materials.  After the sautéing was done (in a few tablespoons of olive oil), I threw in a pint of chicken stock and brought it to a boil.  While that was happening, I washed and chopped up the kale.  Jeez Louise, that was a lot of kale, even though I know it cooks down.  When the broth was boiling I started adding kale, filling up the pot, letting the kale reduce in size, and then doing it again.  Even at that, I only used two-thirds of a bunch and bagged the rest.  When the kale was ready, I did something diabolical.  I poured in two big cans of Great Northern beans, waited 5 minutes and started ladling it out for my dinner.  Because I didn't cook the beans, they were very nice and didn't require soaking overnight, much less rainwater.  The whole recipe took 15 minutes or so, and was delicious.  Tonight, I will take the rest of it and doctor it up with sautéed red peppers and some Tabasco.  Safeway is having a sale on red peppers ($1.79 a pound in the dead of winter!) and I'm a sucker for red peppers.

Here's a Microsoft IT problem someone can help me with.  Lord knows that googling my brains out on it hasn't been much use.  I have a rather large office in my home, in fact it's the entire basement except for that big wine rack over by the hot water heater.  Between Junie's office, my office, and the downstairs lab, I have something like 20 systems, mostly Windows XP, but a couple of Vista machines and 4 Windows Server 2003 machines for websites, domain server, FTP server, VPN server, mail server and so on.  I love Remote Desktop and use it all the time, bouncing around from machine to machine from my desk, or from East Jesus, Wyoming if I happen to be in a motel there with a fast Internet connection.  Two of the systems, one XP and one Server 2003 both lock out Remote Desktop from time to time.  I found that what happens is that, even though it's an "automatic start" service, Remote Desktop Help Session Manager stops at some point, and I'm locked out.  All I have to do is run over to the machine and start it again, but invariably, within the next couple of days, it stops again.  Any ideas?