Saturday Afternoon

We finished up or delicious Easter HoneyBaked ham last night, so you know what that means: bean soup today! I normally use navy beans, but I had a bag of Hurst's HamBeens' 15 bean soup on hand, so I am using that instead. The beans it has are:

1. Northern
2. Pinto
3. Large lima
4. Blackeye
5. Garbanzo
6. Baby lima
7. Green split pea
8. Kidney
9. Cranberry bean
10. Small white
11. Pink bean
12. Small red
13. Yellow split pea
14. Lentil
15. Navy
16. White kidney
17. Black bean
18. Pearl barley

That is 18 though. I guess the barley is not a bean, but what other two would not be considered a bean? Lentils and garbanzo? Or maybe it is like the Big 10 with 11 football teams. It got famous as 15 bean soup, and 18 bean soup just doesn’t sound as catchy.

I boiled the beans for a couple of minutes, and now they are sitting for an hour. I added some dry ingredients while they were simmering: garlic powder, onion flakes, ground celery seed, four bay leaves, cinnamon, and mustard powder. Don't add salt until the beans are finished cooking because it will make the beans tough. The amount of dry ingredients I added also was not enough for the whole batch, just a little bit for background flavor. If you put too much in now, the beans absorb too much flavor and it tastes bad, plus as water boils off it will leave the tastes more concentrated.

Sheri went into the city to have lunch with her friend that crocheted Goliath a blanket, Sheri a doily, and a scarf for me. I stayed home to work on my paper that is due Tuesday. I think I am going to analyze a company's strategy that went wrong.

Sheri went to bed early last night, but I stayed up until after midnight balancing our check book. For some reason an entry was deleted when I converted from the previous version of Quicken. It balances to the penny again.

I also want to get the grass cut today, and maybe go buy a new gas grill. Our old one was a pretty big one. I had to replace the burner a couple of years back, and they didn't have any extra large burners to fit out grill, so know it grills very unevenly. Also, the spacers that steady the handle to the lid are wood, and they have cracked and fallen off, so the handle is "jiggly". The hardware that holds the propane tank has also worn out, so the tank is kind of half sitting on the ground. I found a nice CharBroil at Meijer on special for $130. It also doesn't use the lava rocks. There is a metal fin over the burner that somehow directs the flame so that the whole grill surface gets evenly heated.

You can always tell when I have a paper to write because my posts get longer!

I am in the middle of my twice-a-year allergy attack. My nose is runny. I am sneezing. Without constantly drinking tea I would cough all day. Yuck. If I take an antihistamine I would feel better, but it would knock me out and I wouldn't be able to write my paper.