CRANBERRY BEANS

Continuing the conversation about "Bulgarian buttermilk", Mona Lisa, knowing my fondness for beans asked, "So, what kind of beans did you have with the cornbread?"  I laughed and said, "Cranberry beans."  She said, "Are you fooling with me?  I've never heard of them."  I told her that I had written about them.  Below is a Sue's News article from 2016:

                                                          OCTOBER BEANS


Years ago, on one of our shopping excursions, my sister-in-law Jean and I discovered cranberry beans at Big Bear.  We both bought a bag and cooked them.  Cranberry beans soon became one of my family's favorite beans and cornbread meals.  After Big Bear went out of business, it became difficult to find them;  K-Mart carried them for awhile. Whenever one of us would locate the beans, an APB (or "APBB", as Les remarked!) alert would go out. Last week, Jean called and said that Kroger had them.  She and I bought all the bags that were on the shelf.  

As well as being healthful, the beans are economical and the cranberry beans are aesthetically pleasing.  The bean has cranberry-colored striping on an off-white background.  To me, the beans have a nutty flavor compared to navy beans.  I have found several interesting recipes on internet sites.  I have piqued the interest of several of my friends, but not enough to share my stash of beans.  Our larder has six bags in stock and Les exclaimed, "No more beans until I put beans on the grocery list;  there's enough to last a year;  these will expire!"

Cranberry beans are also known as "October beans" because, unlike most beans, they are harvested in the fall, rather than in the summer.  Other names include:  "shelly beans", "horticulture beans", "wren's eggs", "bird egg beans", and "speckled beans";  in Italy, they are called "borlotti".  An interesting note:  nearly all "borlotti beans" used in Italy are imported from the United States.

I like a wide variety of meals and we do not prepare the same dinner entrees in a month but once a month we have some kind of bean soup.  We like beans so much that we have a rating system for soup beans:

1.  LIMA BEAN SOUP
2.  PINTO BEAN SOUP
3.  NAVY BEAN SOUP
4.  CRANBERRY BEAN SOUP
5.  GREAT NORTHERN BEAN SOUP
6.  BUTTER BEAN SOUP
7.  BLACK BEAN SOUP
8.  15-BEAN SOUP

Those are my preferences;  Gerald's favorite is 15-bean soup the and he does not like lima bean soup.  During my birthday week, I have lima bean soup as one of my favorite meals.

So, when you were a kid, did you recite the Miracle Fruit jingle?

"Beans, beans, the miracle fruit,
The more you eat, the more you toot,
The more you toot, the better you feel,
So why don't you eat them every meal?"

When I was a youngster, my mother did the laundry on Mondays and every Monday she would serve beans, because a pot of beans did not require much tending.  We would have either cornbread or skillet bread, along with fried potatoes, and some kind of dessert.  When the washboard, wringer washer, and hanging clothes on the clothesline were replaced by the modern conveniences of a washer and dryer, she seldom cooked beans.  A pot of beans became a treat.

Oftentimes, on the second day, Mother would put "dumplins" or "rivlins" in the leftover beans;  Grandpa called the left-over second-day creation "daddlins".

At school, our meals were usually good, but when the school cooks fixed beans, they were never "done";  we called them "bullets";  the only time we packed lunches was on "bullet day".

How did we ever tolerate each other without BEANO?  Les calls it the MIRACLE PILL.