beans – Orangette

On short notice

Molly — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 19:38:00 +0000

It’s hard to start a post when I’m bored with the photograph(s) I have for it. The alternate title for this post is “A Life Fraught with Difficulty, by Molly Wizenberg.” But I am never bored with beans. I don’t remember how I first learned of Molly Stevens and her classic All About Braising: The Art of Uncomplicated Cooking, but if you’ve been around here for any length of time, you will know that it is a longtime favorite. I bought it shortly after it came out, sometime in 2004. I was in graduate school then, planning to become Michel Foucault, albeit with more hair, fewer turtlenecks, and a vastly inferior command of the French language. Like anyone who has tried to read…

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While you’re not looking

Molly — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 15:59:00 +0000

I went through a period a few years ago when I couldn’t cook a pot of dried beans worth a damn. Every bean came out waterlogged and falling apart, like a rained-on newspaper, and on the rare occasion when every bean wasn’t waterlogged and falling apart, it was only because a few holdouts had a mouthfeel closer to gravel. I did everything I was supposed to do: I soaked them, brined them, cooked them without salt, cooked them with salt, cooked them at a simmer, cooked them so a bubble only rarely broke the surface. Every way, the window of time in which they were just right, tender but not yet reduced to mush, was narrow at best. Occasionally I hit it, but…

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The bean doctor

Molly — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 07:59:00 +0000

I believe everyone should know how to doctor a can of beans. I also believe that, having said this, I have become my father. I also believe I would do anything, anything, absolutely anything to get R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly,” which lodged itself in my head as I was typing those first two sentences, back out of my head again. Spread my wings and fly awaaaaaaaaaay I come from a family of bean doctors. The beans we ate most often were baked beans – Bush’s brand, I think – to which my dad added brown sugar and Worchestershire sauce. We ate them whenever my mom was out for the evening, usually with boiled hot dogs. It felt…

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Please consider

Molly — Fri, 22 Nov 2013 17:46:00 +0000

So, how bored will you be if we talk about soup again? Ham Bone, Greens, and Bean Soup? I didn’t set out to write about this one – I made it mostly as a vehicle for a ham bone that I put in our freezer last April, forgot, and then triumphantly unearthed the week before last – but June liked it so much that she did her special high chair “dance,” swaying from side to side and grunting, so I changed my mind. Swaying and grunting: strong praise from young June E. A. Pettit! (Also, Swaying and Grunting: what I will call my debut album when I launch my third career as a down-and-out country singer.) I know that it’s almost…

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