Cold Beans

Both Wayne and Ronnie admit to eating baked beans, cold, right out the can. Many people I know do. Standard lunch for a working day in the woods is a can of beans, a can of sardines, and some crackers. Ronnie was going to be setting out his sweet potatoes today, 150 plants, all day on his knees, knew he was going to be in pain. He said he sold 400 pounds at the farmer's market for 60 cents a pound last year, and of all crops, they require very little work after planting. I generally raised a quarter-acre of them, harvesting the greens, to dry as hay, before I dug the potatoes. It's nice to have 400 or 500 hundred pounds of sweet potatoes, when you're cooking hog-slop every day. An acre of field corn, dried and shucked, stored in fifty pound bags in the hay loft; cooked, usually, because it's so much more easily digested. I forgot to ask Ronnie about his hominy, B said he thought it was very good. That combination of lye treated corn and beans is a good diet. Some day-lily buds, some cattail shoots. Succotash, there's a nice word. I think of it as baby limas, with the corn, and a fat piece of cured pork, now I cook it with minced onions and peppers. With cracklings, this is a meal. Rolling thunder moving in, power has been off and on. Off for an entire evening when a good-old-boy took out a telephone pole, but this front seems off to the south. Rain tomorrow, but should be nice when Kim gets here Friday. I'll be gone for a few days, talking and eating with him, and since I trust honest conversation above all things, it should be a nice couple of days. At least one field trip, into town, to talk with TR, with a stop at the pub. We could go over to Kentucky and visit the Creationist Museum, or go down and look at the new bridge site. Maybe stop by B's place and talk about building on the cheap. This is always a great conversation among house carpenters: building a shed from used pallets, or shingling with flattened sardine tins. The bumpers of certain trucks can be used as rafters. You can actually build a shelter from almost nothing. I'm not good at splitting shingles but I can still overlap a roof that doesn't leak. It rained hard, which is mind-numbing, I'd shut down Black Dell, she hates sudden loud bursts of thunder, and was reading a history of the tomato. Jefferson raised them, at Monticello, liked them baked, stuffed with rice, and diced pork; and then the whole Italian explosion, tomato sauce, pizza, of course, and the ways tomato could be used in stews. I have to go, this storm is right on top of me.