Musical Fruit Meets the Muter

Friends, I come to you today with a message of hope, with words of joy. Yea, though I have groped through the crisper drawer of fuzzy dampness, I fear no veggie.

My story begins with a simple bag of dry beans. Oh, we all have one of these secrets in our cupboards: the bag of bulk food we bought because it seemed like a good idea at the time. We were going to start eating healthier. We were going to learn how to cook something that required more directions than "just add water" or "heat and serve." The beans called to us from the dispenser at the co-op. Buy us, they crooned, for we are good and good for you. I fell for it and giddily added a bag of them to my groceries, verily I skipped down the aisle with my basket of nutritional nirvana.

When I arrived home, I tucked the beans into their new home, front and center in the food pantry. They sighed contently. I smiled warmly. We were happy to have found each other, even if our time together was going to be brief. For I was going to prepare some culinary treat that would make the heavens sing in exultation over the healthiness of it all. I closed the cabinet door and went off to find a recipe worthy of such ingredients as the beans.

Well, that was six months ago and I just used the beans two days ago. And the only reason I finally used 'em in a dish was because I was tired of moving the bag out of the way every time I reached into the pantry for the bag of Fritos. Now there's some goodness for you!

I made some turkey chili on Sunday. I was motivated both by my need to get these beans out of the pantry and to make a pot of something I could nosh on all week. I had the chili recipe but had no idea how to adapt real honest to goodness dry beans to the directions that called for cans of this and cans of that. These are canless creatures, these beans o' mine! How many of them would fit into a can? I wondered. Off to the internet I went.

Amid the plethora of websites all eager to help me in my conversion confusion, I found one site that suggested I throw a carrot into the pot of re-hydrating beans and the ... uh ... tooting quality of the musical fruit would be muted. Oh, really. Do I look like I just bought these beans yesterday, chum?

Well, I gave it a shot. What did I have to lose, really? This was one more way for me to get a slowly softening veggie out of the crisper drawer of doom and actually do something with it before I lobbed it onto the compost pile. I found two perfect candidates for toot-absorption duty, cut 'em up into 2-3 inch chunks and dropped them into the pot with my 2 cups of dry beans that would yield 1 pound of beans that is equivalent to 1 can of beans. The carrots stared up at me with their one good eye (did they have that eye when I threw them into the veggie drawer?), blinked disconsolately, and then rolled over in the murky broth.

And do you know what? It worked! I kid you not. I have been eating chili for two days now and have not needed to open any windows or step out of the room to go "check on the cats." Whatever the carrots did, they did it well. This might as well be beanless chili for all the impact the little legumes have had on my intestinal tract. I'm a believer.

I can't wait to go buy more beans.