The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 51

hearty soup that serves six adults and costs a little over $3 include beans and a savory selection of vegetables Eammr 'Paul Glinei v. 7 A 0 1 V- Cook the onions in the oil in a large Dutch oven, stirring them often, until the onions are well carmelized (about 90 minutes). Add the garlic during the last 5 minutes. Stir in the drained beans, the 10 cups water, tomatoes, bouillon cubes, bay leaves, sage and thyme. Simmer the soup, stirring it occasionally, for 2 to 2'i hours, or until the beans are fork-tender.

Stir the unthawed green beans and peas, the vinegar, salt, pepper and hot pepper sauce into the hot soup. Simmer the soup for 10 minutes, or until the vegetables are tender. Taste and adjast the seasonings. For each serving, ladle soup into wide hot soup bowls; put a mound of rice in the center. Sprinkle with onion, put a dollop of yogurt on top and sprinkle with hot pepper sauce.

Serve hot. Note: To do the soup a day or so ahead, when the beans are tender, remove the soup from the heat and refrigerate it, covered, for up to 4 days. Do not add the green vegetables until the final heading, or they will lose color and flavor. Reheat the soup, adding additional water if needed to achieve the projH'r consistency, and adding the vegetables and remaining ingredients. Complete the recipe as directed.

RICE 4 cups water 2 cups rice 4 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon margarine Heat the water to a boil in a saucepan. Stir in the rice, salt and margarine. Return it to a boil. Reduce the heat to very low and cook the rice, covered, until it is tender, about 15 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat, fluff the rice with a By Carol Rasmussen Chicago Tribune $4.95 dinner for six adults HO SAYS YOU can't buck the high cost of living? We decided to design a meal for six adults that cost only $6.

In other words, a dinner for $1 A big pot of vegetable bean soup ($3,16) Rice (24 cents) Red, white, and green salad nouveau ($1.30) Strawberry cookie-tarts (25 cents) The salad looks handsome and a la nouvelle cuisine if you form a layer of lettuce on a platter, and then arrange rings of shredded carrots and shredded raw white turnips (they are crisp, slightly spicy, tastefully clever) over the lettuce. A homemade basic vinaigrette salad dressing is delicious with the salad. For dessert, you bake simple shortbread cookies and divide the dough so there is one large cookie for each person. Dabs of strawberry preserves are centered on the cookies part-way through the baking. These cookies are the tender, gentle-flavored cookies your grandmother used to bake and they end this meal nicely.

They are so satisfying, you keep eating them even if you are full from the first course. You definitely will want to make them again and again. And why not? They cost per person. It seemed a timely challenge this dinner for hard times one we expected to require a lot of thinking and planning, but well worth the effort. Armed with a few rules we imposed upon ourselves, we sat down to worry about it But worry was unnecessary, it turned out, for we invented a really fine tasting meal for well under $6.

Our dinner for six cost $4.95. This computes to 83 cents a person or a dinner for $1 with change back. Prices are the typical everyday costs; usually several ingredients will be on sale, cutting the costs even further fork and keep it hot until needed. RED, WHITE, AND GREEN SALAD NOUVEAU 2 tablespoons vinegar 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard or teaspoon dry mustard a teaspoon thyme 4 teaspoon each: salt, pepper, sugar 'i cup oil 'j large head Iceberg lettuce, thinly shredded 4 carrots, about pound, peeled, finely shredded 2 white turnips, about pound, peeled, finely shredded Combine the vinegar, mustard, thyme, salt, pepper and sugar into a jar with a tight-fitting lid. Shake the mixture to dissolve the sugar and salt Add the oil and shake it well to blend.

Set it aside. Arrange the lettuce over a serving platter. Arrange the shredded carrots and turnips in separate circles on the lettuce. Keep them covered and cold. Just before serving, sprinkle with the dressing.

STRAWBERRY COOKIE-TARTS cup (1 stick) margarine, softened cup confectioners' sugar 1 cup flour teaspoon each: salt, baking powder 3 tablespoons strawberry preserves Confectioners' sugar Heat the oven to 350 F. Cream the margarine until it Is light, and gradually beat in the sugar, beating it well. Mix in the flour, salt and baking powder. Stir the dry ingredients into the butter mixture until a dough forms. Divide the dough into 6 pieces.

Shape them into (i rounds about 3 inches in diameter and '4-inch thick. Put them on an ungreased baking sheet. Make an indentation in the center of each for jam. Bake the cookies at 350 for 10 minutes. Fill each indentation with Va tablespoon jam.

Continue baking the cookies for 8 to 10 minutes, until they are light golden. Cool them on a wire rack. Sprinkle the cookies lightly with confectioners' sugar. They're best if served warm. Actually, that amount is the highest price this meal could have been because we based our figures only on the regular retail prices of food; We reworked our computations based on the adver-.

tised sale prices for four of the ingredients that were on special that week and saved 70 cents more overall. This meant the meal would have cost $4.25 for six people. Because all of the ingredients are everyday ones, some of them are likely to be on sale every week, so the meal almost always should be less than $4.95. And it is a good meal. Hearty, rib-sticking, really good down-home food.

Yet it is a meal, we feel, that we would hesitate to serve for casual entertaining. Beyond being a meal we liked enough to cook for friends, another of our rules was that the meal must be "nutritiously balanced. It must also be colorful and appeal-ling to the eye. To be as thrifty as It is, every dish must be homecooked, on few packaged foods, and where possible use house "brands (yogurt) and generic ingredients (flour, sugar, salt, -margarine, oil, vinegar, tomatoes, frozen beans and peas, irice, strawberry preserves). The penny-pinching approach of this menu is to use a hearty bean soup as the centerpoint; it is hard to find an entree that is less expensive than that.

And yet, there is something comforting and warm and satisfying about a 'really good soup; it stimulates, happy feelings and easy -conversation. Because the soup is based on dried beans, there is rice "in the menu to make the vegetable protein as complete only a quarter. HEARTY VEGETABLE BEAN SOUP 1 pound white beans 2 tablespoons oil 4 large onions, thinly sliced, about 1 pound 4 cloves garlic, minced 10 eups water 2 cans (16 ounces each) whole tomatoes 5 beef bouillon cubes 2 bay leaves VA teaspoons each: sage, thyme, crumbled of a 16-ounce package frozen green beans 1 i of a 16-ounce frozen peas 3 tablespoons vinegar 34 teaspoon salt or to taste 'a teaspoon pepper teaspoon hot pepper sauce or to taste Rice, recipe follows Toppings (Optional): 1 onion, finely chopped 1 cup plain yogurt Hot pepper sauce to taste Cover the beans in cold water and soak them overnight. Drain the beans. If time does not permit overnight soaking, bring the beans to a boil in water to cover; boil them for 1 to 2 minutes, remove them from the heat and let them stand, covered, for hour.

Drain them and nourishing as the protein in, meat However, the vegetable protein of beans and rice is easier to digest and carries no fat or cholesterol. If you add animal products to the meal, such as a dab of yogurt as a garnish, you'll add saturated fat and cholesterol but that is a minor addition. An interesting and continental garnish for soups such as this is a dollop of plain yogurt and a spoonful of raw chopped onions on top. Frankly, the soup doesn't need it, but offering little extras has a psychological appeal; it makes the dish seem extra special and it is a nice touch for company. The cost of these extras is 56 cents, or less than a dime a' person, which brings the grand total to only $5.51 for the entire meal.

The soup contains onions, tomatoes, green beans and peas for good nutrition, good taste and good looks. And what herbs and a touch of vinegar will do to pick up the taste and give beans a lively flavor is amazing. If you want a little meat in everyone's soup bowl, you might add one-half pound of Polish sausage, sliced thinly and sauteed before adding it to the soup. The cost of the Along with a big pot of bean and vegetable soup and the rice, which you can heap into the soup or add bite by bite, there is a large tossed salad consisting mainly of Iceberg lettuce that is shredded so it makes mounds of crisp, juicy greens. You get so much lettuce by shredding it, you would need to prepare only half a head.

a Michael DOligan Television Other than a sabotaged attempt to invent pay television before its time, Weaver hasn't been active in the medium since. But, during those two brief years in Hollywood, he changed its very nature. In a business dominated by P.T. Barnum types, Weaver emerged as a thinker, a man of principle and vision who hoped television could be an asset, not a of Americans were willing to watch the tube at 7 a.m. To balance Today," Weaver added an evening program with a similar format Johnny Carson is still doing quite well on that show.

Another of Weaver's innovations was the "spectacular" (known more modestly these days as a one-time-only, 90-minute event that preempted regular programming. These would combine comedy, dance, popular music and, when possible, "great cultural entertainment that at this point the general public does not like. by integrating it into lighter forms, we think we've been able to create an audience for it." ft? imm: A EANWHILE, WEAVER was devising programs as diverse as "Show of Shows," which made stars of Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, and The Wisdom detriment, to cultural awareness in this country. He saw TV as an instrument of enlightenment. Weaver felt if the American public wasn't primed for fare more highbrow than The Lone Ranger," television could change that, could educate people to appreciate the finer forms of entertainment Television can be great," said Weaver, "if it assumes greatness." Weaver's first innovation was the so- president of Subscription Television, a pay-TV service that would operate in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

But formal resistance from theater operators, who feared the competition, was fierce. KGO-TV, KRON and KPLX refused to carry Weaver's ads. The matter wound up in the courts and Weaver won. But, by then, his funds were dissipated. Weaver went back to his roots in advertising, joined an agency and left the public eye.

But his influence not only improved the quality of television in the 1950s, it does so to this day. Inside Scene THE '508: What teen-agers were doing and talking about. Page E6. THE TREASURES of Shanghai are on display at the Asian Art Museum. Page E6.

PUTTING ON the dog in high style. Page E9. Inside Arts PHIUP ELWOOO reviews Hall and Oates. Page E11. ALLAN ULRICH reports on the Ballet's season-.

closing program. Page Ell. "LITTLE HOUSE" will be leveled by NBC, says Marilyn Beck. Page 1 2. "URGH! A MUSIC WAR" is 90 minutes of new-wave music by 24 acts.

Page E13. IVVl featuring interviews with elderly ngures like Bertrand RusselL Carl Sandburg and j'Pat' Weaver's TV legacy 1 LA 'PAT WEAVER His genius still shows 3 HE 5QS, as argued in this space yesterday, may have been less of a "Golden Age" for television than we like to imagine, but the medium did boast some creative geniuses back then and Sylvester "Pat" Weaver Jr. stood tall among them. Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1954, Weaver began pounding the drum for color television, which he believed would lure more viewers and better enable him to pursue his original dream.

"We want to upgrade American tastes," he said. And color television will force the pace of change." (Not coincidentally, NBCs parent company, RCA, was then producing this country's first color TV sets). After Weaver became NBC chairman, he was isolated from the programming decisions upon which he'd built his reputation. By the following summer, NBC was suffering dismal ratings. After a reputedly heated board meeting, Weaver emerged unemployed.

He was back in the news in the early '60s as called "magazine format" of commercial sales. Back then, programs ere all sponsored by a single company. But he began selling commercial space in a single show to several advertisers. To introduce this new concept, Weaver created a special type of program the talk-and-entertainment show. First came Today," which made Dave Garroway a friend to early risers and proved millions Weaver, who formerly had worked in San Francisco as program director at KFRC radio, joined on Dec.

4, 1953. Two years later, he was elected chairman of the board. A few months after that, he 'was fired..