LOOKING BEANS

For those of you who read other blogs (shocking concept, but…) the following is not, I repeat, not a rip-off of OldNFO’s remarkably great blog, or of his blog-post from 5-12-18, found at: https://oldnfo.org/2018/05/12/comfort-food/ I wrote this originally the day I posted my second post here, the first one I did all by my lonesome as a grown-up (yeah, right) blog author. So, parallel evolution of thought, so to speak. And to lighten the mood after Juvat’s rather furious discourse and all the darkness surrounding that post (which was a really great post, by the way) I offer you this…)


LOOKING BEANS

Ha! Fooled you, didn’t I? Here you thought it was another story about Kwajalein or something else completely fascinating, but, no. I’m going to talk about the lost art of Looking Beans (and other food related Lookings.)

My parents raised me to eat what I was served. No special ‘Children’s Food,’ no hotdogs, or mac and cheese when the parents are eating roast or something equally delicious. Nope. My parents raised me and my brothers on ‘adult fare’ and for that I am truly greatfull. It helped that my parents were really good cooks and my dad had an aversion to organ meats so I was spared the joys of kidneys or livers, except as part of Dirty Rice or something equally scrumptious (and never ever bovine innerds, just chicken or turkey, and never just ‘fried livers’ (bleh. I’ll cook chicken livers for my wife, I’ll even clean them and de-vein them, but eat them? No. Just no.) Good food. Like, oh, Gumbo, Grouper au Brennan’s, Dirty Rice, things like that. Tasty food (and that’s another story.)

But… Looking Beans? Beans? How can beans look, they have no eyes…

Back in the ancient days of food preparation, before there were processed foods that took over our lives, when one would go to a grocery store for the beginning of food, not already made dishes like some weird smorgasbord, people used to actually cook beans from raw. Oh, not talking about growing the beans from scratch, I’m talking about taking dried beans and making delicious cooked beans from them. Carefully gathered from the wilds of the local food store, in bags. Yes, those beans.

 

Not these bags of beans
from allcornhole.com

(a safe for work site, though your IT geeks might freak if they see it.)

 Nor
from RBandU.com
(potential bean-bag story in the future)

I mean, these bags of beans

 
(from free, non-copyrighted sites dealing with beans)

So, some farmer or farmers somewhere actually does the whole ‘growing’ thing, getting dirty and smelly and legumy. And said farmer or some other agri-worker harvests the legume pods (using really cool machines that will kill you quicker than anything) and the pods are carefully unrolled on the thighs of virgins.. wait, taken to a factory where the beans are removed from the pods and then packaged by weight into various bags, plastic or paper, or even barrels and buckets, along with some other things that aren’t so legumy (there’s that made up word again, I think there’s a rule that the third time makes it a real word.)(legumy)

The adventurous food preparer, as stated before, must brave the hordes of zombies (been to Wally-world lately?) or shoppers or whatever, and secures a bag of one’s favorite dried beans (pinto being my favorite) and goes home and proceeds to immediately chow down on them, no? No. First must come the sorting of the beans, also known as Looking. 

Get the bag of beans (or an appropriate scoop of them from a larger container) and get a large pan, not the one you’ll be cooking in, and place it on the counter or your lap or on top of the sleeping dog or whatever. Open the bag, if you already haven’t done it yet. Now take some of the beans and put them in your hand. Oh, look, beans. Anything funky? No? Drop sorted beans into the pan. Get more beans, Look more beans, put looked beans in the pan. Repeat, repeat, repe.. Wait, What The Hell Is That? A rock? Get rid of it. A twig? Get rid of it. A dead mouse? Get rid of all the beans. A mouse bean? Eh, get rid of it. Get the point? Looking beans is all about, well, looking at the beans and keeping only the beans. Good bean lookers can just basically slowly pour the beans through their fingers and catch and eliminate non-beans without really breaking stride. (Modern bags of beans tend to be much cleaner than those of 30 years, or definitely 40 years ago. Machine processing has some really great benefits.

Wow. Exciting. A whole article about checking to see whether there’s non-beans in a bag of beans. Woooooo. Well, not really. What this is all about is actually looking at unprepared food before picking it up.

 I Look Food. There, I said it. I look at the food in the store or on the plant and discard what isn’t food. Even before I look beans I look at the package of beans. I look milk for the expiration date and if the container is leaking. I look meat for its sale-by date and if it looks good (shiny rainbow pattern is not good, or too much gristle or fat or, well you get the drift. I look veggies and fruit, especially, to make sure I don’t get damaged or rotting stuff (to the point I’ll pick up a bag of potatoes and smell it for a rotting one and not get that bag.) 

Most especially, I Look Bacon. What I mean is I look through the little window on the back of the package for the most lean eating bacon I can find, or the most fat bacon for rendering into that best of cooking oils, bacon grease. Why Look Bacon? Because, Bacon. Bacon, bacon, bacon. BAAAACOOOON.

Bored yet? Wait. There’s a reason for all this. While I was cooking bacon on Sunday, I thought about my fellow shoppers. Have you ever noticed them, I mean really noticed them. Have you ever seen people who just grab the first thing they come across? Like bacon, just grab the first package on the shelf? Grab the first head of lettuce or the first apple or whatever? What do they do when they go home with that unlooked container of strawberries, just eat whatever without picking out the moldy squashed ones and washing the sand off? Have you ever wondered just what was or wasn’t going through someone’s head who isn’t aware of basic things about their surroundings, like, you know, what the pre-food looks like before they buy it? How, unfun their life must be?

I’ve even talked to my younger friends about Looking Beans, just looking beans, not all the philosophical garbage I'm rambling on about now, and they look at me like I suddenly started speaking Mandarin. Crazy, isn’t it.

 

 

TASTY BEANS

Oh, by the way, after you Look Beans (pinto beans for me, thanks,) put them in a big pan and rinse them, fill pan with water (with the beans still in it) and let them soak overnight and add more water (if you rinse them first you can keep the bean-soak water which adds flavor, but do rinse) before adding salt and that meaty bone from the ham you’ve kept in the freezer and some pepper, too. Cover, and bring to boil and then reduce to simmer, stirring occasionally and cook until the beans are soft and taste cooked (and add more salt if needed) and what ham was on the bone has fallen off (cut the ham into smaller pieces and discard the bone.) Keep enough water in the pot to make a good thick 'bean liquor.' Serve in a bowl with cornbread on the side (real cornbread, southern style)(see below) and butter. Reheat for a good meal, or cold on bread for a snack (yeah, I’m weird) and freeze what you don’t want to eat right away. Make chili with the remaining beans. Make chili dogs with the remaining chili, if you bean chili, that is. One day makes most of one week’s food (I have a problem cooking in small amounts.)

 

 

 

SOUTHERN CORNBREAD the way my daddy taught me

Okay, I’m a cornbread snob. Here’s the nitty-gritty on ‘real southern cornbread.’ First, get a well seasoned cast iron skillet (the small one, not the large one or the mongo one you go camping with)(What? You don’t have cast iron? The shame!)(see below-below.) Get a decent self-rise cornbread mix, or mix your own using just cornmeal and flour and rising stuff (read the damned recipe on the bag, okay?) Okay, now you’re ready to cook cornbread. Put the skillet in the oven and turn it on. Yes, heat the oven and the skillet at the same time. Now, go mix your cornbread but do not use oil. Use 1 stick of butter, special-like. Ding, the oven’s heated your well-seasoned skillet, now toss the stick into the pan while it’s in the oven. Let the butter melt in the pan in the oven. Finish mixing up all the other ingredients, pull the skillet out of the oven with the now smoking melted butter and pour the butter into the mixing bowl (oh, yeah, use a metal bowl, not plastic or glass, oops) and place skillet on a trivet or on the stove and finish mixing up the mix. Pour the mix into the still blazing hot pan (which makes a really good crust) and put the pan in the oven. Cook the appropriate time, pull pan out, slice the bread once while in the pan and check to make sure it’s cooked all the way through, if not put back in for 5 more minutes, repeat, eventually you’ll have flaming hot cornbread just ripe for butter to melt on. That, my friends, is ‘real southern cornbread.’ Do not use sugar. Damned Yankees.

 

 

CAST IRON

Like I have to tell you all to get cast iron. Seriously. Come on. Well, okay, take a brand new cast iron and toss it in the bbq on hot, burn all the stench out of it (which is why you cook it on the Barbie.) Grease with bacon grease or lard, inside and out, and cook it some more, repeat, some more, repeat on the inside some more. Let it cool, wash it with water and a paper towel. Fire up the inside oven and toss it in when you cook something else. Eventually you’ll get the inside of the pan the color of blackest shiniest night. That’s when you’re ready to cook with cast iron. Wash with water and a paper towel or a scrubby pad but no soap and not too hard. If something won’t come off, soak it first. If you screw up, start reseasoning all over again (seasoning being getting that glistening black surface on it.) But you all knew this, right?