Beans

On Friday I made beans for the first time. Yep, you read that right. And why is this monumental or even worth typing about?

You see, growing up we had a bag of dried garbanzo beans in our pantry for as long as I can remember. Why did my Mom buy dried garbanzo beans? She probably didn't buy them at all. We moved so often there for a while, that those beans were probably previous inhabitants of one of our homes. I also remember a can of water chestnuts staring at me from the pantry of a couple of homes on Ferris Street.

Back to the beans. I was about 10 years old when my Mom decided to teach us to play poker. She got the cards out and sent us to come up with something to wager. Bellaire girls that we were, we searched for pennies and nickels. (Come on, it was the early nineties, before the dot com boom, when we would have searched for bills.) I guess Mom realized that it could become complicated if everything wasn't in the same denominator; she went into the kitchen to come up with a better plan. Out came the garbanzo beans!

(As a side, I also tried the water chestnuts that day. Crunchy, virtually tasteless, mostly pointless. I get their texture use, but think I could come up with something better in most cases.)

Until about six months ago, I had never seen anyone cook beans from their dried state. With a little coaching from Christine, the South Austin, famed, southern cook, I made my first pot of beans. I took the pot, wrapped in a Flintstones towel cause I am fancy like that, over to her house Friday night, where my beans were served with rice and cornbread and quickly devoured.

Now it's Monday again. Back to eating "right", which I am pretty sure is not supposed to include beans (with sausage). I bet a garbanzo bean soup with water chestnuts would be approved. But, that's not right in so many other ways.