Some
mornings I wake up and I just want a bowl of my Mama’s beans. She would start
with her beans the night before – carefully picking out any rocks or other
weird pieces that might’ve come in the bag, and then would leave them to soak
overnight. In the morning, she’d change the water, add some bay leaves and set
them to a low simmer on the back right burner of our old stove. Drop in a
couple of bay leaves, some other spices and off the beans went to do whatever
it was that they were supposed to do. It was watching her preparing beans that
I first learned a lesson in patience.
Sure,
I didn’t exactly want beans for breakfast, but show a little girl one of her
favorite meals and then say that she has to wait until dinner, and the struggle
becomes tough! And yet, somehow I managed to make it through every one of those
days.
This
morning, I woke with a serious hankerin’ for some beans. And not just the
thought of opening a can of black beans and weighing out 150 grams on my scale.
Nope. I wanted full on real southern beans. Cornbread. A cold glass of milk,
too.
Of
course, there’s no way that’s going to happen. I have neither the recipe nor
the time to make beans the way Mama could. Cornbread is also nowhere near the
same Universe as my current meal plan! So what to do, I puzzled while making my
coffee. I did the best thing I could think of in this early morning … I opened
a menagerie of beans, plopped them in my soup pot, added some spices and set
the burner to low. It’s not going to be the same as sitting on the floor eating
soup-beans out of a chipped bowl, but it’s as close as I can get.
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