Food for Thought: Greek Lentil and Olive Oil Soup

Background to the meal: A soup I am cooking tonight for Furtherfield mob. It's a soft exchange for being their house guest in their flat in Haringey, London--and for FF allowing me to interview them for my PhD research.

Furtherfield are a core of 2 - Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett - who for the past 10 or 11 years have established and nurtured networked art and cultural experimentation - via online and offline playful participatory structures.

Some of their projects are documented here:

http://furtherfield.org

Original recipe source: my Greek friend in Adelaide, Niki V.

Ingredients:
Brown lentils (1 or 2 cups), washed
Some onions, chopped
Some cloves of garlic, chopped roughly
oregano and bay leaf or 2
a stalk or 2 of celery (chopped or whole)
a carrot of 2 (chopped or quartered)
1 or 2 cups of olive oil
feta cheese (I prefer Bulgarian)

Program:
Throw all elements (except feta) in deep saucepan, cover with water, and then more water.
Cook for an hour or so.
If you have broccoli or spinach you can throw some in at the end.
Also you can add a bit of tomato paste if you like.

Serve with bread and a bowl of feta cheese, People can add their own cheese to their bowls of soup. You can present the feta by sprinkling it with oregano, and covering with a bit of olive oil.

This soup is tasty the next day, served with basmati or persian rice. It is good to freeze, and thaw/eat in those times when you are being crushed by deadlines and can't be bothered shopping and cooking.

Comments

Greek soup ...

My hosts enjoyed it, and we have just had it for lunch.

I think there is a strong link between making art, writing and the pleasures of cooking.

As I am doing my PhD through the University of Technology, Sydney, and I live 1,000 kms away in Adelaide (aka Idlebrain), most of my dialogue with my supervisors occurs over email. They are both excellent cooks, so I estimate 25% of our correspondence is about food -- what we are going to cook, how we have cooked it, and sharing recipes.

I would like to find a way to weave both poetry and recipes through my thesis, not sure how yet.

Writing is like art-making and cooking .. sometimes you have the ingredients but you have no idea how they are going to come together. And you need to enter that trance zone to begin the process of making.

domestically practice-led

hello

wondered if you might be interested in a reference to this thesis 'Trahere the sense of unease in making a mark ; the practice of drawing and the practice of thinking' by Dr Aileen Stackhouse at Dundee University. Aileen's thesis incorporated poetry, recipies and 'sounds of doing' through writing.

best wishes
Lindsay

recipe-led praxis

Hi Lindsay!
that thesis sounds like it incorporates the ingredients i'm wanting to cook with myself. is it available in electronic form do you know?

recipies

will check it out for you
Lindsay

reference

hello

heard from aileen on sunday, her mac has died so her e-version of her thesis is not available at the moment. the thesis itself is in four books, each with many sections, so it would be impossible for me to even contemplate scanning it in for you. here is a link to the library (click location) http://library.dundee.ac.uk/F you will see how many sections it has. she did however give me a copy of one of the sections on home (only 10pgs or so) so i will 'electrify' that for you. please bear with me however as i have alot of projects to finalise. you will read about them soon in my journal.

best wishes

Lindsay