Green beans are "in"

If an eagle were to fly to the summit of Mt Everest once a year and to pick up a single grain of sand and carry it away, before eternity had passed, Mt Everest would be leveled down to sea-level.

I am sitting in a lawn chair on my front porch, waiting for the water I am using to blanch green beans before freezing to come back to a boil.

I picked one side of one row and netted about five pounds. On sale as frozen vegetables it would cost about 99 cents for 16 oz....12 oz...10 oz....

Hardly worth my time.

But skills are perishable and education is expensive.

A couple of tangents:

Tangent One

I was quite taken by the fact that Old Belivers (Russian Orthodox who live in deepest Siberia) have a summer home and a winter home. The extremes in their climate put such demands on their dwelling that no one structure can serve in both summer (+100F) and winter (-65F).

They all have summer kitchens out on a porch. What a fabulous idea!

I have a single outlet on my front porch wired to 12 gauge wire and with a 20 amp breaker. I have a card table holding a small toaster oven, a crock-pot and a 1000W, single-burner hot-plate.

The toaster oven will quite handily cook a 12" pizza or enough chicken parts for a meal.

The crock is the cat's meow for tough meat, stew or chili.

The hot-plate if for pasta, rice or potatoes. Today it has been pressed into service to blanch the green beans I picked. I picked half of a row. I have two rows of green beans. I netted about five pounds.

Tangent Two

Blanching is the process where vegetables that are to be preserved by freezing are heated to the point where the enzymes that drive ripening are destroyed but not hot enough or long enough to "cook" the vegetables.

A temperature of 170F will do-the-deed although nobody actually measures temperature. It is more of a dump-in-boiling-water-stir-and-drain-in-X-minutes.

The bottleneck is waiting for the pot of water to come back up to boiling. I am using 3 minutes to blanch the green beans but it is taking about 12 minutes to come back up to heat.

The table. Beans process from left to right. Five hand-fulls go into the pot in the left-upper corner.

After stirring for three minutes, the water and blanched beans are decanted to the colander and kettle. The water is returned to the heating pot and the beans cool until the next batch when the are moved to the bowl on the right.

I intend to get one last use out of the hot water. I plan to serve venison and mushrooms over spaghetti for dinner tonight. Nobody will taste the green-beans in the water I used to cook the spaghetti.

Yep, sure enough. Us guys are roughing it with our wimmin folk gone. But we are stoics...yes we are.