Good cooking is a feel rather than a recipe. There are, of course, additives like bouillion cubes or pepper which change the flavor of a food but which are mostly intended to do that. Real food tastes good. Your sense of taste is set up to let you decide what is good to eat. Your sense of taste is a BOIS, a basic input output system. Things that tend to poison you, like spoiled food, taste bad. This essay is a report on how a set of basic ingredients went together to make a wonderfully good soup without a single flavor enhancing ingredient. Recipes are fine but the essence of good cooking is the method. Once you get the method clear it's easy.

            It all started with the corned beef. The K-Mart had a 99 cent corned beef sale and I had some. I boiled it for dinner and after it got almost cooked and softish, added potatoes, onions and    later, cabbage. We had a great corned beef and cabbage dinner for about a buck each. The vegetables were all eaten but the juice was left over. Corned beef juice is powerful, you have to be careful, so I canned a little jar of it for use later. Basically, I filled a jar with the hot juice, shook it until the vapor stopped spitting out when I loosened the lid. I then put it in the steamer. When it came out, it was canned. This is not good canning, but it is good enough to keep the jar labelled, corned beef juice, in the ice box until the next soup came along and needed the flavor.

               I knew I had the corned beef juice so I decided to soak some lima beans. I put a glass of lima beans in water and left them overnight. I poured off and replaced the water whenever I thought of it, three or four tmes. This multiple washing is supposed to reduce farting after eating beans . I put the boiling corned beef juice in with the beans in a Rival Crockette cooker for about four hours. That cooked the beans.

                Now I have cold cooked beans and I have corned beef juice. I boiled the corned beef juice and cut up a couple of onions and put them in. Mary had a red bell pepper so I cut it up for the color. I had some overcooked mushrooms so I threw them in to add flavor and adsorb water. I had some cooked chicken legs, so I put their meat in. I added a little water to cover and cooked for about ten minutes. I added the beans. The result was a wonderful flavored bean dish.

        `        The principle is this, when stock is available, soak some beans. Cook the soaked beans slowly in boiled stock. Cook onions and whatever in the rest of the stock and add the beans. It works, garlic is sometimes helpful and there are always bouillon cubes.

                This is the idea. Make boiled dinner like pot roast and get juice left over. Soak beans  in water time and again to reduce farting. Simmer beans until soft in water or juice. Combine with onions etc. and enjoy.