Butterbean Pickin'

Nanny loves butterbeans and has been anxiously watching the two rows we planted. We've been walking the rows together, feeling of the fattening pods. For the past couple of weeks, we've held off on the picking. At last, they're ready.

Butterbeans - at least the bush variety - are a b*tch to pick. They are low to the ground; each pod must be fondled to determine if the beans inside it have matured; there are millions of pods. This makes for slow going come picking time.

Nanny picked part of the butterbeans yesterday morning. She made it about 1/4 of the way up the rows before the sun became too blistering hot and drove her indoors. When I came home from work yesterday, I started where she quit, picked for two hours, and ran out of daylight about 10 feet from the ends of the rows. Between the two of us, we picked five 2-gallon buckets full of beans. There's probably one more bucket-full in that last 10 feet. Not all of the beans were ready; we'll have to do this again in a few days.

The black-eyed peas will be ready to pick about the time the butterbeans finish.

Meanwhile, the tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash are ripening like crazy. I've made all the pickles I need, and Nanny has made a dozen jars of cucumber relish. We're giving the cucumbers away (twice a week) by the sack-full. I spent the past weekend canning tomatoes, and it looks like I'll be doing the same thing this coming weekend.

On Monday, I bought half-a-bushel of peaches from a local grower who had set up a make-shift peach stand on the tailgate of a truck in a parking lot in town. They were fat, juicy, clear-seed peaches, and I brought them home to make peach jam. I should have known better than to commence the process at 6 p.m., but I was anxious to get to them before they ruined, so the minute I got home I changed clothes and started peeling and slicing the peaches. The cooking started at about 7 p.m. By 8:30, the stuff in the pan was still too loose and runny to suit me. I did some calculating: they'd need to cook for at least another hour before they could be put into the jars; it would take at least 30 minutes to get them ready to go into the water-bath canner, and another 30 - 45 minutes to get the water boiling and do the processing. It would be 11 p.m., at the earliest, before they'd come out of the canner. Yuck. I considered taking the pan off the burner, refrigerating the mixture, and finish cooking it the next day, but I remembered those butterbeans waiting to be picked the next afternoon....

So I came up with Plan B: put the stuff in the crock pot on low heat, cook it all night, and put it in jars early the next morning before going to work. Problem solved.

Right.

Yesterday morning when the alarm clock beeped, I rolled out of bed and went straight to the kitchen. I raised the lid on the crock pot, expecting a thicker version of the beautiful translucent gold mixture that had gone into the pot. Instead, I found a slowly-bubbling black ooze.

I turned the crock pot off in disgust, and left the mess where it sat.

It's still sitting there, mocking me every time I walk by.

Tonight, I'm coming home with more peaches, if the peach lady is still in town. And I'm going to put a beautiful translucent gold mixture into some jars if I have to stay up all night to do it.

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