Rules to live by

One of the seldom mentioned perks of having annual themes is that it eliminates some decision making.  

Do I take a poor quality picture of the rodent at the Sonoran Desert Museum?  Of course I do.  Rodents are one of my things.

We happen upon The Curious Kumquat in Silver City, New Mexico at lunchtime. They are serving only full sit down meals rather than purveying supplies for a gourmet picnic.  We already ate a full breakfast and don't plan on a full restaurant lunch.  But there is a duck confit salad on the menu.  And a Oaxacan Mole Chicken sandwich, and it is bird year.  So we stay and now I "get" duck confit.  It was fabulous

And while in Tucson, we were at a Mexican grocer and encountered fresh garbonzos for the first time in my life.  Do I know what to do with fresh chick peas?  No.  Should I get them?  A brand new bean?  By all means, I need to try those beans.

Thanks to the Mister's Mother for shelling.  Steamed with salt and pepper, the beans were fine.

Black-eyed Peas and Stars

Tonight I'm going to see the old year out looking at the Milky Way from the Smoky Hills of Kansas*.
Tomorrow, I'll be introducing the in-laws to the all-important lucky legumes of the New Year: black-eyed peas.
Wishing you a 2012 filled with laughter, learning and good luck. Don't forget to eat the black-eyed peas, lentils, tamales, sauerkraut, apples and honey, dumplings. or whatever it is that brings you good fortune.
*Themed resolutions run through the Chinese New Year or Janet's birthday, so I technically have more time to observe the constellations, but I will have few chances as good as a winter night on the ranch.

Lucky Noodles in the News: Message from the Universe

Today's Charleston Gazette food section features "Lucky Food for the Year of the Tiger". With a back drop of a photo of cold sesame noodles with bean sprouts, the article explains how one should be eating long noodles and long beans this week for luck. Not just a noodle recipe-- lucky noodles surrounded by lucky legumes for the Chinese New Year. Clearly the universe is sending me a message. If only the article had added which pink sparkling wine to drink with the lucky legumes and noodles if one is born in the year of the rat, well, then I'd be able to interpret the message.

Legume Loving Begins

Dianthus ate his first legumes yesterday, Gerber's "organic sweet peas". According to the Mister, who fed him, more did go into his stomach than onto his bib. It's hard to tell from the photographic evidence.

Labeling mushed green peas (aka "garden peas" or "peas") as "sweet peas" disturbs me. I don't know of any sour peas and the plant that is commonly known as sweet peas (Lathyrus odoratus, shown) is poisonous.

For those of you wanting more Dianthus firsts than I've been reporting (or recording): he first turned over stomach to back regularly at 3 1/2 months, he was sleeping through the night most of the time by 3 months, he giggled and babbled lots starting at 4 months and he turned over back to stomach, by himself, not on accident, Dec. 23 at his grandparents' house. He was 4 months and three weeks at the time. His first non-milk food was baby rice cereal last weekend, Jan. 16, at 5 1/2 months. He seems to like both rice and peas. Not long before adzuki beans.

Combination Bean Supreme

The Mister and I spent huntin' week (aka the week of Thanksgiving, but schools aren't closed all week because of preparations for the day of gratitude, not when there are deer to shoot) in Williamsburg, VA with the Mister's Family (thanks MiL and FiL!) searching for bean things to write about. More accurately, we spent time with family, visited colonial stuff at Williamsburg, Yorktown, and Jamestowne, and ate well. The bean incidents were entirely incidental, but, in a legume year, one should report them.

First, at a Vietnamese restaurant on Monday, I ordered a Combination Bean Supreme (R5 on the menu), not because I particularly wanted a sweet, cold bean drink at the end of a long drizzly drive, but because it's bean year, how could I not? The drink included mashed sweet red beans, coconut milk, ice chunks and gelatinous green spikes that may be a mung bean product (Flicker image of a similar drink). It was tasty, but is no substitute for a good Vietnamese coffee.

On Thanksgiving itself, my BiL and SiL made green bean casserole (which they first made one Thanksgiving in Normandy) with all fresh ingredients. I'm not sure that blanched fresh green beans, cream, fresh mushrooms and shallots that have been pre-fried into fantastic crunchies can accurately be called green bean casserole (Campbell's pictured here), but the results were excellent, none the less.

Any holiday bean traditions in your life?

Mountain Dal and Mung Bean Suggestions

Organic mung beans appeared in my shopping cart sometime in the early spring as something to try for legume year. It turns out I already had a bag in my cupboard. And I didn't do a thing with either bag for months.

Actually, I still haven't done a thing with either bag, but the Mister recently pulled out the beautiful Mangoes and Curry Leaves by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid* and decided to actually cook from it. Fascinating what great ideas that man comes up with. And he decided to look for recipes using mung beans, because we have them in the cupboard.

He found a recipe for Nepalese Mountain Dal, followed it, and we ate leftover rice and thick, brown, uninteresting dal for a week.

I concluded that I just like lentils better than mung beans.

He concluded that we haven't given mung beans a fair chance.

There's a third possibility that what the recipe calls for ("mung dal") is somehow different than what we have (mung beans) and some searching on wikipedia suggests this is at least partially true. Chinese cuisine seems to favor the green, husk-on "mung beans" we have (similar to what's pictured) while on the Indian subcontinent split, husked mung dal is eaten, which creates a softer, yellow, lentil-like mush.

Whether I'm right or not, the Mister is correct that we need to do give mung beans (the green ones we have) another chance. Here's where my helpful readers come in. Anyone have any suggestions?

*Thanks Molly!

Bean Boy Rising

Before I met the Mister, he had informed me that he was working on perfecting the preparation of gallo pinto, a Costa Rican beans and rice dish. This thrilled me, "Here," I thought, "is a man who can really cook and is into legumes: I think I am smitten."*

Imagine my disappointment when I learned that he used his diswasher only for storage, the meals he did prepare consisted of a piece of meat grilled on the George Foreman, and the tamale cookbook he had on the counter was apparently just for show.** On our first date we ate at a new Thai restaurant and he never once mentioned the spicing on his seven spice fish curry or asked me about my panang. The Mister ate pinto gallo while in Costa Rica and garden green beans when he visited his parents and didn't think about them otherwise. The Mister was not a good cook and didn't give a hill of beans about bean hills.

How much has changed.

In the six plus years I've known the Mister, the greatest transformation I've seen in him is becoming a great daddy. This transformation, however, is mostly just one of opportunity. Nobody who knows the Mister is surprised he's a great daddy, but before the arrival of Dianthus, great daddy-ness remained dormant. The second greatest transformation I've witnessed (or second third and fourth, depending on how you count) is to becoming a really good cook, a crazy foodie and an intense gardener.

This transformation came about gradually. By the third date we were discussing the food (Malaysian) and watching a charming Japanese food movie (Tampopo, highly recommended) and somewhere during the first six weeks of dating (before I left for summer field work in Montana) I taught the Mister that sauteing the onions before adding the other omelette ingredients makes all the difference. He credits me for bringing about the onion change which somehow led to cooking all sorts of wondrous things, most of which involve the fragrance of sauteing onions when one walks in the door. These days, he cooks more often than I do.

He'd probably object to the term "foodie" as it implies some sort of snobbery (as do "gourmet" and "gourmand"), but the Mister now cares about food. He talks about it, he plans around it, he'll analyze it in his spare time. Since I have always been like this***, I'm not sure I noticed at first. Sure, we agreed that nice meals were a good use of money. Yes, the Mister started reading cookbooks and buying ducks to roast. And, yes, he purchased Where to Eat in Canada before the Canadian Maritimes trip so that we could plan what amounted to a culinary tourism vacation properly, but somehow I didn't really realize until this summer.

Travelling from Como to Rome in May we bought separate train tickets Como to Bologna and Bologna to Rome so that we could eat lunch in Bologna at a restaurant we chose after consulting three books and two websites. The Mister purchased Anthony Bourdain's Nasty Bits at full price for light summer reading and started a new list of places for us to eat in New York City when someday we go. For our anniversary in July, we spent the weekend in Pittsburgh. The Mister not only made reservations for a fabulous six course tasting menu at a nice restaurant, but also consulted several websites to find out where we could stop for Thai food on the drive there and back. While we ended up eating at Olive Garden going and Long John Silver's coming back, it was not for lack of trying on his part, which is when I decided that I needed to write an anniversary post about how very well suited the Mister is for me.

Of course, Dianthus arrived soon thereafter, so this post has been lurking in my brain unwritten. It is now a birthday post for the Mister. And Dianthus is demanding attention at the moment, so the parts about the Mister being a great gardener and bean cook will still go unwritten (but notice the great bean structure he made in the vegetable garden he created and cultivated).

In any case, please wish the Mister a happy birthday**** and know that I know I'm lucky.

*Okay, the legumes weren't a particularly big deal at the time and it wasn't just his professed cooking ability that smote me so quickly.

**I just found this out a month ago. While I had wondered why meeting me made him stop making tamales from scratch, it never occured to me that a man with a tamale cookbook and masa on his counter hadn't actually ever made them. I am such a sucker for a well-placed ethnic cookbook.

***Always implies an awfully long time, but before you accuse me of hyperbole, know that you are reading the blog of someone who can still list most of the meals she ate on a vacation in 1981, wrote her big eighth grade investigative "I-search" on cheese tasting, and checked out The Magic of Herbs from her elementary school library over ten times.

****Birthdays are major celebrations in my family and very minor celebrations in the Mister's. I'm trying to change his thinking on this as well. It has, thus far, not worked as well as sauteing onions, but I have considerably fewer opportunities to exert my influence.

The image is of the Mister and William playing "wheeee" which they both enjoy and which makes me melt every time I see it.

Italian Beans III

Devoted readers of this blog have been relentless, "enough about the baby, what about the beans?" So I take this brief moment while The Mister has the baby, not to do something useful like take a shower or file medical paperwork, but rather to post photos of legumes in Italy.

Fava Beans (Italian Legumes II)

Fava beans seldom pop up in the diet of Middle America. I've long known of their existence and their importance in Egyptian cuisine (which, is, in itself, odd because I couldn't tell you another distinct component of Egyptian cuisine). I've also known for years that Brits eat them fresh as broad beans. What I didn't know is what they taste like. I know now.

Not much.

I'll be the first to admit that I may not have prepared them in the most succulent of ways. The Ambassador, the friend I was visiting in Rome, had purchased the beans as a novelty at the local vegetable market and promptly forgotten they were in her refrigerator. I peeled them, boiled the beans and mashed them with olive oil, rosemary, salt and lemon juice. The resulting paste was spread on rice cakes. Altogether it was a success, but made one wonder why one didn't just make hummus.

I later learned of a seasonal Italian soup involving fresh fava beans and artichokes, but was unable to sample it as I never recognized it on a menu nor knew exactly what to look for.

Italian Legumes I (without images)

Spring here in Northern Italy is rife with blooming beans. What I believe are black locusts grow wildly along the railroad tracks, broom pops up in odd places, and I am a huge fan of wisteria, which is done blooming in Como, but is still in full flower here in Brunate, a village above Como (up a 50% grade on a funiculare). I've been almost 35 hours in the country, however, and have yet to eat a bean. Don't worry; I will.

Beans of Spring

The week was about as bad as it would seem from the earlier list, made a little worse by the flood and the regular threat of a re-flood, but we survived it.

We ate our first pea shoots last night (not very good) and took pictures of all of the beans we are going to miss: wisteria, broom and baptesia. You'll see those after I return.

Altogether a very hectic week was vastly improved by great friends, one of which sent me a legume leaf photo just to make my day. Thank you all.

Ciao!

Baby Beans

The baptisia (a.k.a. blue false indigo, left) in our yard is growing inches daily. The peas (right) are slowly reaching for the second string.

The double tulip and strawberry flower are not legumes in any sense, but are depicted here to demonstrate that I finally figured out the macro lens on my camera.

Good Bean Soup

The Mister and I received a packet of ten bean soup, made my someone at the Women's Bean Project for Christmas. I like beans and I like bean soup, but I'll admit I was dubious about the ten bean soup because 1) different beans don't all cook the same length of time 2) it didn't seem to have anything to give it much flavor beyond the beans (i.e. no ham bone or carmelized onions added) 3) soup packets usually leave me wanting for everything but sodium. Much to our surprise, the soup, prepared following the packet instructions, was excellent.
The Mister has since attempted to imitate the soup, and his was also very good, but for both great soup and for supporting employment for underemployed women in Denver, I think the $5.50 for Toni's Ten Bean Soup is well worth it.

Capital Beans

Last week the Mister and I ventured to D.C. for some legume tourism*. Saturday at a bridal shower I had my first ever edamame and radish tea sandwich (the filling had the color of this paste from the Artsy-Foodie blog), which was very good but not as tasty as the basil and bacon or mushroom butter sandwiches.

Sunday we went to the US Botanical Garden (on the National Mall, not to be confused with the giant National Arboretum away from downtown) and I was impressed by the number of legumes in flower. There were forced redbuds in vases, brooms in the bulb display, several economically important legumes in the "plants and people" hall, and fairy dusters in fruit in the desert. The plant which impressed me the most, however, was an Australian vine dripping with deep purple bean flowers. Hardenbergia violaceae 'Happy Wanderer' is evergreen, drought tolerant and can take freezing temperatures down to about 23 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the San Marcos Growers website from whence the image is taken. (Karen's Flicker Photo and another capture the depth of color very well).

Sunday night we introduced Mervivian to Ethiopian seasonings and were reminded that we should prepare yellow split peas along with our favorite red lentils in berber.

We drove home on a gusty sunny day through the battlefield at Manassas and Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park where mud season has not visibly given way to spring in legumes or any other plants.

This morning the Mister planted peas.

*Okay, the intent of the trip was to see a dear friend who will soon by moving and take in city life for a weekend , but legumes make it sound much more interesting.

Bean Baby

Long before we were serious about having children, the Mister and I spent time listing "great" names for our non-existent children (all twelve of them). By "great" I mean names that made us giggle, whether or not we would actually inflict them on a human child. We've had a series of alcohol names (Ouzo, Galiano, Schnapps and little baby Johnny Red Label), of mixed ethnic names (Jesus Goldstein, Valentino O'Dell, Katerina Suarez, Taguchi Morningstar, Bubba Li, Fitzwilliam Kim) and Old Testament names (Gad and Zilpeh currently, although Joash and several other kings have been considered). Of course, we have the actual names we call our fetus: Mervivian Phogg and Alloicious* (or Alowicious or Allouicious**) and it really is fortunate that Mr. Splashy Pants arrived when she did, otherwise the Mister would call the growing alien monkey that. We have names of creatures, names from literature, horrible adjectives and nouns, names of places, but, I realized yesterday, we don't have any bean names for our baby.
Once in my life I had a friend who was serious about having eight children and serious about naming them after ericaceous plants (plants in the heath/rhododendron family). I had a great time picking out names for her: Heath, Heather, Eric, Erica, Laurel, Kalmia, Pieris, Azalea, and Huckleberry, among others. If Fabaceae (the legumes) is one of the largest plant families (and it is) and one of my favorites, surely I can think of great bean names for my child.
I'm at a total loss, however. None of the common names strikes me as suitable: Mimosa and Indigo might be the closest. I'm more likely to use "little locoweed" than "sweet pea" as a term of endearment. Among the scientific names Glycine max sounds like an interesting character, but not a child. Robinia? Astragalus? Medicago? Psoralea? Pediomelum? Baptisia? Lens? Phaeseolus? Oxytropis? Trifolium? I think not. Any suggestions?

*Mervivian when we feel girlish, Alloicious when we feel boyish. No, we do not know the gender or our child and are not planning on finding out. The only reason I particularly want to know is because "it" is so dehumanizing in English. Still I find the question, "When will you find out what it is?" somewhat offensive, as if the only thing this child has going for it is a penis or lack thereof. Usually I answer that we're pretty sure it is a human, although we certainly haven't ruled out alien monkey based on ultrasound. I find the "What do you want?" question to be very distasteful, and I'm shocked at the women who will answer it in front of their fetus. I don't think it takes having had a miscarriage to realize that any child is miraculous, whether or not childbirth happened 10 billion times or so in the last century. "Mervivian Alloicious, we want you to be a happy healthy person (or alien monkey)."

**Hector Alloicious is a family name (my parents' pet turtle) so Mom and Dad should be able to shed some light onto the proper spelling.

Bean Books 1 and 2: Wonderous Wisteria

My first "bean book" was one I happened to have on hand, Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees. I first read The Bean Trees in college and while I did not love it the way I had loved Kingsolver's Animal Dreams, I loved it enough. Kingsolver illustrated for me that one could be a biologist and a novelist, that one could write books with interesting plots and characters that one cares about and that social issues can have a place in fiction. I clearly wanted to be her (sans the insomnia, messy divorce and rural Kentucky childhood). Sometime later I fell out of my infatuation. I enjoyed both Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer, but unlike one friend who thought they represented Kingsolver's transition into literature, I thought they were substantially less fun than her earlier works, and a good bit longer. The time I spent defending Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and the locavore movement (both to family members who did and did not read the book) exhausted me with the side effect of making me annoyed with Barbara. All told, it had been many years since I had last read The Bean Trees when I picked it up a few weeks ago, and I was expecting a disappointment.

The disappointment never came. The Bean Trees is still a wonderful book. True, the flaws are more apparent to me than they were the first time I read it: some characters are way too folksy, the plot wraps up a little too easily, there are individual bits that could be considered outlandish, outdated, preachy or downright silly. However, as whole, it works for me. Beyond that, the bean references, while only a passing part of the story, are fabulously accurate. Dead vines in a scary urban park erupt one day into a profusion of wisteria flowers. Several weeks later another conversation takes place in the park.

Turtle was staring up at the wisteria flowers. "Beans," she said, pointing.

"Bees," I said. "Those things that buzz are bees."

"They sting," Lou Ann pointed out.

But Turtle shook her head. "Bean trees," she said, as plainly as if she had been thinking about it all day. We looked where she was pointing. Some of the wisteria flowers had gone to seed, and all these wonderful long green pods hung down from the branches. The looked as much like beans as anything you'd ever care to eat.

"Will you look at that," I said. It was another miracle. The flower trees were turning into bean trees, (pg 143-144).

Immediately upon finishing The Bean Trees, I unknowingly began reading another wisteria book, The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. One of the "fun thoughtful books" from my SiL, The Enchanted April was the one I was least looking forward to, largely because I've seen the movie and remember only that it wasn't memorable. Imagine my surprise to find the book, following exactly the same plot, to be strikingly memorable. Yes, it is the story of four English women who travel to Italy to sit in a garden for the month of April (written and set just post World War I). Yes, April, Italy and gardens enchant them, and yes, very little else happens. Yet von Arnim makes things happen. As women are sitting alone admiring the freesias, conflict is broiling. It is never loud, it is never action packed, yet things definitely are happening. Von Arnim's particular skill is taking a very sweet plot and making it tart in places. Everybody is transformed by the enchanted April, but everyone remains the same. The self-absorbed twit is still a twit, the crank is still a crank. They will all return to London and still be miserable. Yet somehow it's believable that they will all be better, too. Highly recommended for those intrigued by the romance of the garden, the romance of Italy or the romance of someplace, anyplace, where it is spring in profusion.

Garden plants of all sorts play a role in The Enchanted April, but three legumes are featured: the wisteria whose promise draws them to Italy, the Judas Tree (a red-bud) that defines the a private garden and the acacias (probably black locust, Robinia pseudo-acacia) that perfumes the air and snows petals as they leave.

Beans! The Legume Resolution

I'm excited to announce that I am resolved to explore the world of legumes* in 2009.

How, you may wonder, does one explore legumes?

Well, for one thing, I will eat more of them. I'll be eating favorites including black bean breakfast burritos and spicy red lentils, but also trying new beans eaten in new ways (to me). I've never cooked fresh fava beans, never tried sweet beans in my bubble tea, never experimented trying to make my own daal or falafel and I haven't a clue which soy milks taste bad. I've purchased adzuki beans several times in my life and never once figured out what to do with them. That will change this year.

As a botanical family, beans are interesting beyond the edible parts. I hope to do some legume gardening and some legume tourism as well. Possibilities would include the prairie in bloom with baptisia, gardens of the South overflowing with wisteria, the Texas hill country when the blue bonnets are out, the desert with mesquite or a safari among acacia trees. None of these trips are planned, by the way, but as one of the largest plant families, I'm sure to find legumes to observe in Italy and here in my own garden, two trips I am planning on making.

Beans have made their way into literature. I'll be rereading The Milagro Beanfield War and The Bean Trees, and looking into Jack and the Beanstalk and other magic beans. Happy Cricket recently informed me that Thoreau was interested in beans, so it appears I'll be looking into Walden for the first time. Other suggestions are most welcome.

Finally, I'll be writing about beans as well for other forums. Prairie turnips, Pediomelum esculentum, my favorite dissertation study organism, are legumes (not turnips) and its high time the world learned of them through some peer-reviewed articles in ecological journals.

So, legumes, here I come. They, are, as the rhyme goes, good for your heart.

*The legumes, correctly the Fabaceae are a plant family typically known as the "peas and beans". The family includes beans (green, black, red, navy, white, cranberry, pinto, kidney, soy, wax, string, runner, long, broad, fava, anasazi, adzuki and garbonzo), peas (green, sugar, split, chick, and poisonous sweet), peanuts, lupines, prairie turnips, indigo, mimosa, mesquite, red buds, golden banner, wisteria, locust (honey, black and new mexico), laburnum, vetch, clover, alfalfa, gorse, broom, and locoweed, among many others.