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Dried Beans: A Metaphor for a Life Holding Unknown Promises
How I returned to soaking beans overnight and living more fully
I haven’t had the energy to cook from scratch for years. Well, some things, yes — quick easy things like scrambled eggs.
But starting with dried beans, the overnight soak, cooking and seasoning them into little soft pillows of delight? Then making chili with the juicy beans? I fixed chili because it was tasty, cheap, and easy to fix, and a pot of it lasted for several meals. And those requirements had become more important than the quality of each ingredient.
It had been quite a while since I’d even thought of starting — the night before? Good grief, no way.
One day cruising Facebook, I watched a writer friend’s video challenge* to start chili the right way — with dried beans! Later, standing in front of the shelves of dried beans, I wasn’t even sure, among the choices, what I was going to make. But I’d been buying cans of beans for years, so my eyes went to black beans and pintos. I grabbed the dried pintos because they were the only ones in a one-pound bag; all the rest were two-pound big boys.
I had my friend’s video and her challenge, but thought I needed to know more about dried beans. One pound is two cups. But beans get a lot bigger when they soak. So I tried looking up…
