Wash Them Beans

I'm having three friends including two fellow bloggers, Kate of High Altitude Gardening and KC of Focused On Fur, over for dinner tomorrow evening. The Engineer is in China and I've been having a tremendous yearning for corn bread, which he won't eat, so I had the brilliant idea to invite them over to help me eat some.

Of course once I started thinking cornbread, I started thinking Southern cooking... Soul Food. Sometimes I really miss the cuisine of the North Carolina. Not everything; I could do without liver mush or scrambled eggs with pork brains my whole life. I've never tried chittlins, nor do I even like to be in the vicinity when they're cooking. Same with kale and collards. Some things are just too (hmmm, what's a polite word?) pungent to imagine putting into my mouth.

Ribs. Ooh, ribs. Couldn't find any good looking ribs at either of the two grocery stores I went to, so I bought a fresh picnic. It's in the crock pot right now. Tonight I'll bone and clean it, then back into the crock pot along with the BBQ sauce tomorrow. Ah well, it will be easier and neater to eat than ribs.

Pinto beans are a staple along with corn bread. I picked up a bag at the second grocery store. Started them today, nothing worse than not quite done pintos -- they can give you a real stomach ache. I picked through the bag before I started rinsing and found a small black rock, a twig and some icky beans. Then I started rinsing and the water turned gray and grainy. Gross. There was mud stuck to many of the beans. I think I rinsed those beans in a dozen changes of water, but finally it ran clean. I didn't find anything else disgusting on the final, fine tooth comb, inspection.

Sigh, I love pintos, either cooked until tender or refried, but they are a pain to prepare. You have to be careful, lord only knows what might be in them. I once bit down on a small rock in a Mexican restaurant. They gave me my dinner free, but I'd rather have had no rock and paid in full.

But don't even suggest canned beans. If I'm eatin' beans, they ain't coming out of no can!

The Garden Is Growing

For the most part. Only the beans seem truly unhappy. I planted four short rows of bush beans and four trellis feet of pole beans. None of the pole beans have sprouted and only a very few of the bush beans. I think I'm going to sprout some between paper towels this week and put them into the garden as soon as the tips of their roots begin to show. See if I can get a decent stand that way.

The sugar baby watermelon are doing very well and have cute tiny babies to show. The squash and cucumbers are up, the cucumbers starting to vine. The horseradish I transplanted is recovering and putting out green leaves. The shallots, however, are suffering from being laid on by cats. Why cats like to lay on the shallots, I don't know, but they seem to find them a delightful bed.

The tomato plants are finally starting to take off and the first Black Prince (a Russian heirloom variety) is setting.
I have basil to go with the tomatoes.













Of course the bindweed is trying to make a go of it too.