Beans And More Beans

The clock says 8PM. I’m pondering eating some supper. I have beans. I can eat great northern beans for supper. I like pinto beans and kidney beans and black beans, but I have none of those in my kitchen. I have Beanie Weenies: original, baked, and hickory smoked flavors. I call that last flavor “hickory smoked,” but the label on the can says “smoked hickory.” Hmm. I’ll need a veggie to go with them, and I have a choice of turnip greens or collard greens. Or a salad, but I ate a salad for lunch, along with half a baloney sandwich. Beans and greens: that sounds decent, does it not?

What I would really like is butter beans. If you’re not from the South, you might know them as lima beans. But for me, lima beans are cream-colored whereas butter beans are green. I’d call them green beans but that name is taken: string beans and snap beans and green beans are different names for the same bean. And why even call a green bean a bean? It’s not bean-shaped. Plus, three names for the same thing seems redundant. And confusing.

When I was a kid, I would sit on the front porch of my grandparents’ house, with a paper bag full of snap beans and a bowl in my lap, and I would “snap” the beans. First I would string the bean (de-string it to be precise) and then I would snap it. I think the bean farmers have bred that stringy part out of the bean. Other times I would sit and shell butter beans. (I was removing the shell so you’d think “de-shell” or “un-shell” would be the term.) Years later, I bought butter beans from a man who had a butter bean shelling machine. It had paddles that turned inside a wire drum that turned the opposite way. Basically, shelling butter beans (lima beans) involves whacking the hell out of the beans. The wire drum allowed the beans to fall out of the drum into a tray while the shells stayed inside the drum. The whole shebang was run by a small electric motor. It was ingenious.

This is too complicated. Times a-wastin’. I’ll skip supper tonight. In a few hours I’ll wake up hungry and eat a couple of chili dogs. I realize now that on my last trip to the store, I didn’t buy enough wieners and buns. Hot dogs are my fallback meal choice. Sometimes I envy my married friends—they don’t have to make these decisions. Their better half tells them what they will eat for supper and they simply reply, “Yes, Dear.” Life is simpler for them. I also think there are entirely too many kinds of beans in the world. Do we really need more than two or three kinds of beans?

It’s 9:30PM. Time flies when you’re multi-tasking, and I’ve been chatting on WhatsApp with a friend while writing this blog post. I probably haven’t done a good job at either task. No matter, I’m hitting the Publish button now. G’night all.