Cooking Sunday dinner today. Cooking BIG: baked ham, hamburger steaks in gravy (brown AND tomato), mashed potatoes, slaw, butterbeans, pineapple casserole, and peach cobbler. I'm hoping that'll do it for a couple of days. Most of it is done, already, or on auto-pilot.
The butterbeans were dried Fordhook beans. I cooked some for the first time a few months back and was not very impressed with them. They tasted fine, but had big, tough skins that slipped off the beans during the soaking and the cooking. If I'd cooked those beans long enough to get the skins tender, the insides of the beans would have been pure mush. Today, I tried a new tactic: as the bean skins floated to the top during cooking, I dipped them up into a cup, and when I had a cupful, I whizzed them (with some cooled cooking liquid) in the blender and poured them back into the pot. Then I just cooked until the beans suited me. Problem solved.
I was going to tell you about the big dinners I used to have every Sunday, before my children got wheels and while my parents were living, but I am distracted by a battle going on under one of the porch chairs. This chair has two little spiders living under it. (I battle spiders every day.) I just watched one of the little spiders attempt to wrap up a stink bug that's probably 10 times the spider's weight. I thought for a minute that the spider was actually going to win, despite the stink bug's struggles. I saw it hurry down the web, do a few spider moves, then hurry back up the web. The stink bug was cowering between in the space between two floor boards. The spider came back down the web and approached the stink bug, then it (the spider) suddenly JUMPED BACK, as if the stink bug had blasted it with something caustic. (Can stink bugs blast?) The stink bug calmly disentangled itself, and motored away . . . straight toward the other spider's web. I wonder if the stink bug is stupid or self-confident.
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