Magic Beans

It has been a while since I have tackled a keyboard and attempted to jot down much of anything. I could say that I have been busy, or lazy, or apathetic...all would be true and also none of them are true.  Sometimes I just  discontinue projects for a time and then come back when the mood strikes, or winter does....whatever it takes to find myself with a little more time and a few thoughts to ponder.

In this case it is beans.

"Beans, beans, they're good for your heart. 

The more you eat, the more you fart. 

The more you fart, the better you feel. 

We should all eat beans at every meal."

This little rhyme, sadly enough, is what is typically trapped in my head from about June until sometime in September because one of the main focuses of the summer season is.....beans.

I can't say that beans are exactly my favorite crop (that honor goes to garlic), but they certainly are a useful one.

They are good early in the season as green beans  At this stage we pick them and eat them almost as fast as we are able and the ones we don't eat, we freeze for winter's lean months.  But, if you get busy and don't get them picked, they dry well and then you can eat them that way too.
They are a forgiving crop and ridiculously easy to grow, and in my life, that counts for a lot.

Beans come in more varieties than I would ever care to name, but there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 different varieties of beans.  Of course you wouldn't know that living in Iowa....here there seems to only be one....soybean.

Personally, I grow three different varieties - two of them I plant on purpose (one pole and one bush) and the third one is a freelance pole bean that self seeds and sprouts every year and then I just transplant it to where I want it to grow.  My main producer, however is the bush bean known as Black Valentine.  It is a dual purpose bean that makes nice green beans as well as a wonderful dried black bean.  What is the difference between a bush bean and a pole bean? One grows as a bush and one will trail and spiral its way up a tall pole.  In tight spaces the pole beans are nice, but when you have more space and don't want to have to deal with a pole or trellis, bush beans are optimal.

When asking people today where they get their cooking beans, I am almost universally met with a blank stare followed by some line amounting to, "well, we just use canned beans from the store," and then they look at me as though I am just not quite right in the head, I mean, where else would a person get beans, right?  Once again, people have forgotten how ubiquitous beans used to be.

Beans are one of the crops that have been cultivated the longest.  Native Americans would grow them together with corn and squash in a "three sisters" planting - using each of those three plant's best qualities to help the other two grow well. The colonies, and particularly Boston, perfected the baked bean.  From the colonies they were hauled overland in covered wagons and were a large percentage of the diet of the early pioneers - they were high in protein and fiber, transported well, grew well and could be saved for incredibly long periods of time. No cowboy dinner would be complete without a plate full of beans, and what kind of Mexican restaurant would it be without refried beans on the side?

 But chances are, if I put five beans in the palm of a person's hand today, they wouldn't know where to start with growing or cooking them.

So let's start at the beginning.  Someone gives you five magic beans....what do you do?

These beans - they are a fairly large seed in and of themselves.  Easy for even small children to plant.
1/2 - 1 inch down in the ground and roughly 6 -8 inches apart.

Keep them weeded.  Invite your friends to help.

Pick them green when the pods are long and full, but before the seeds inside start to mature.  They should "snap" easily in half - crisp and tender.  At this stage they can be steamed for 7 - 12 minutes until they are bright green and just slightly tender.  Seasoned with salt and butter, they are likely the first vegetables to be devoured at dinner.

Miss a week or two of picking the green beans, but keep the weeds down and then let the pods start to turn light tan and dry.  If you thought you had a lot of green beans, just wait until the dried beans start to show up.  I usually give myself some sort of limit as to how long I will pick each day.  I typically pick one pillowcase sized sack full any time I have a free hour or so.  This is when that little rhyme sets up shop in my brain and refuses to leave until I find myself simply singing it while kneeling in my bean patch.... this can become a monotonous job, but then again, watching a sun set or watching a summer storm quietly build while picking is more meditative than monotonous. And communing with the bees and the beetles as well as the occasional visit from my ducks waddling through would often make this one of the more contemplative jobs that had to be done.

After each picking, I dump the bag's worth of beans out on my porch to dry. And by dry, I mean the pods have to be so dry that they crack open with relatively little pressure and reveal a dried, black (or brown, or spotted depending on the type) inside. Sometimes this drying takes a day or two and sometimes weeks.  It is also largely dependent on whether or not I have time to deal with them - beans drying in the sun are amazingly patient.

When the time is right, pack them back into the bag you picked them with....I know this sounds redundant, but bear with me.

Jump up and down on the bag and then dump them into a large bowl or pail. (My littlest kids think this is great fun) Set up a large house fan on high and, while standing in front of the fan, slowly dump the beans from one pail into another with the air blowing away the chaff.  This takes time, but slowly, by crushing the remaining pods and winnowing out the chaff, a hill of beans will emerge.  I can usually spend an evening winnowing beans on my porch and end up with 3 - 5 pounds of relatively clean beans by the time the sun sets.

At this point I usually take the bowl of beans into the house and find a movie that I know by heart and sit down to sort through them by hand to pick out the "bad" ones.  This is a completely mindless task, but one that, for one reason or another, is also very soothing - probably because the "finished" beans are so pretty and fun to sink your hands into.

I know....I know....this is a lot of work for a measly hill of beans, but now...those 5 magic beans have become hundreds (if not thousands) of beautiful, protein rich beans that can be saved and eaten through the winter in soups, stews, or even as a most amazing black bean dip.  On average, for a family of 7 people, we will have several gallon jugs filled as well as a 3-4 quart jars.  These, then, become the staple in chili, ham and bean soup, black bean dip and baked beans.

To cook:  Take 1 cup of dried beans and cover with water - place in the fridge overnight to soften. Then, to cook, put in a pot with water and boil until they are soft being sure not to let the water completely boil off.  Drain the beans (or don't - depending on the recipe) and use in whatever bean recipe strikes your fancy.  This really is ridiculously easy but it does require time and a little planning ahead.

Black Bean Dip

   1 cup black beans boiled and soft 

(reserve some of the fluid they were boiled in)

1 -2 cloves of garlic

fresh cilantro

salt to taste

Mix the cooked black beans and roughly 1/2 cup of the water they were boiled in, the garlic cloves, cilantro and salt into a blender or food processor and mix until smooth (adding more water if necessary to make a bean dip consistency)  Salt to taste and eat with tortilla chips.

I make a batch of this and it is gone before it has time to cool off with hungry kids around.

These beans, these magic beans, are magic in so many ways.  Not only do they provide and incredible food source, but while they are growing, their roots bind nitrogen in the soil and help it to become more fertile.  They are a restorative crop and one that I plant in areas where the soil was plundered by other crops the last year - crops such as corn which are horribly greedy plants that strip the ground of its nutrients to produce a huge plant that supplies only 2 small ears of edible goodness.  Beans, relative to their size produce more edible produce than many of the other plants in the garden.

 Yes, they take time to plant, and cultivate, and harvest and dry and process and cook.  But there is some magic in that time as well  - sunsets watched, rain clouds rejoiced, bees observed, kids laughing and playing rhyming games while weeding, a teenager helping to make bean dip- a connection to the earth, each other, the plants and the food that you grow and harvest with your own hands.  There is a strange sort of connectedness in that process.

Not only do they feed the ground and the body ....they feed the soul.  Magic indeed.

The Darkest Day

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_102.html

We are quickly approaching that time of year again.  And, no, I don't mean the time of year that involves elves in red suits, flying reindeer, nativity scenes, bell ringers or carols.  I mean the time of year when the terra firma that we stand on every single day is angled as far away from the sun (or toward it if you are below the equator) as it will be for the entire year.  The day is as dark as it will be for this year's race around the sun. 

Every day, whether we think of it or not, we are cruising through space at a fairly consistent pace of roughly 67,062 miles per hour, not to mention that the Earth itself is rotating at the same time at roughly 1100 miles per hour (this, of course, depends upon your particular latitude, but for middle America, it is roughly 1100 miles per hour).  Taking those two speeds and revolutions into consideration suddenly makes even the wildest rides at the amusement park seem like child's play.

Now, add in the fact that it has all been going on for approximately 4.5 billion years without significant change or alterations and I find myself standing outside at night looking at the stars with  my mouth agape in complete amazement.  The concept of time is completely lost on humans.  We have no grasp of what billions of years means.  One year?.... yeah, that's understandable.  Ten years?....well, most of us can look back that far and, ironically most of the time we say something like, "Wow! Where did all that time go?"  or "If only I knew then what I know now."  Fifty years? ....We see marriages that have lasted that long and, if you are like me, you say "I wonder how they did it?"  A hundred years?.....This is about the level that humans can reasonably be expected to comprehend on a personal level.  Beyond this point, it becomes antiquity, mystery, mythical.  We may know stories and have a few artifacts, but we really have absolutely no physical idea of how life was several hundreds of years ago much less 4 billion.  I would even hazard to say that the average person, if tossed back in time a few hundred years, would not have the first clue about how to survive using only their wits and the tools afforded them by the Earth itself.  The learning curve in the wild is pretty ruthless.

We, as humans, have lost touch with the Earth.  Oh, we use it daily - we drag coal and oil out of its depths and we haul the fish from its sea and crowd cows, chickens and pigs into insanely small spaces and force the Earth to grow crops that we then rob for our own uses.  We get the Earth to do our bidding and then we all happily go home to our houses, warmed during these cold, dark months with all the oil and coal, turn on our televisions to yet another ridiculous reality show, eat our overly processed, artificially raised food, and then go to bed so we can do it all again the next day. 

Pretty depressing, isn't it?  Sorry about that.  And, to be fair, there are more and more people doing what they can to help the cause, but many days it seems woefully ineffective.

I battle with this "woefully ineffective" thing myself.....all the time.  Sometimes I chalk it up to seasonal effective disorder, but mainly it is just do to the world in general.  Regardless of my mental state, I try to remember that this change in the seasons is a good thing.  Winter is a time for reflection and hibernation which seems to eventually eliminate the depression and readies a person for spring.  I find I can read and digest more books in the winter months than any other time of year. 

One especially good one that I have been working my way through is Folks, This Ain't Normal  by Joel Salatin.  If anyone thinks that I am hard core about living on a farm sustainably, Joel puts me to shame.  I honestly wish I could convince everyone to read this book because he not only understands and talks about farming sustainably, but he does it and proves that it can work on a larger scale.  Much of his emphasis is on treating the earth with respect and being creative in how we solve problems such as energy, food production, water conservation and housing.  There are a few New Year's resolutions that are forming based on this book alone. 

Another book that I am reading is The Joys of Beekeeping by Richard Taylor.  I have been reading a few bee books, but upon opening this one and reading, "The thrill and fascination that filled me then as I watched large swarms stream into hives has never weakened....It follows exactly the pattern established millions of years ago...We see only a small part of the surface of things.  The rest will be forever hidden from us, to be appreciated for its felt but unfathomed presence."  In short, he had me at 'hello'.

I realize that my choice of writers has a lot to do with the level of connectedness that they feel - not just to the subject that they are talking about, but to the earth as a whole.  Emma Restall Orr wrote:  "Perceiving the world as a web of connectedness helps us to overcome the feelings of separation that hold us back and cloud our vision. This connection with all life increases our sense of responsibility for every move, every attitude, allowing us to see clearly that each soul does indeed make a difference to the whole.”  

Those "feelings of separation" are one of the problems with today's society. People no longer feel connected.....to anything.  Ironically, despite e-mail and twitter and facebook, we are all much more disconnected from each other and from nature.  It really isn't natural to sit in front of a computer screen all day and remotely learn about things happening somewhere else when our world - the only one that we will be able to actually touch and physically interact with - lives outside of our house.  

People live for connection with the world around them - eye contact, hugs, relationships.  Without it we are only so much protoplasm walking around without aim or purpose.  It costs nothing to pay attention to other living beings that share this Earth as well- animals, trees, insects - and often these connections prove to be sometimes deeper and more profound than our human ones.  So, as the earth rounds the corner yet again and makes its way back into the hours of daylight, my hope for everyone this year is this.... May you find a connection with some part of the earth around you - be it a roof top garden somewhere in the city, a farmer at a local market, a stray cat that adopts you, the bees in an apiary, the moon coursing through the night sky, or your neighbor next door.  Make this year count because you just never know......maybe the Mayans were right.