Let’s Eat - Great Northern Beans

Let’s Eat — A Writer’s Guide to Cooking
It has been awhile since I have talked about beans, those oft-maligned, succulent morsels of nourishing goodness. Last time around, it was pinto beans, a Thursday favorite at our house. Recently, I made a batch of Great Northern beans that turned out well. After soaking a pound of beans for about six hours, I rinsed them thoroughly and put them in a large pan with eight or so cups of hot water and started them cooking on medium heat. While the beans were cooking with the lid at an angle, I washed and prepared the other ingredients, which included the following: • one fully ripe tomato • three or four medium-sized carrots • about four cloves of garlic • several pieces of tender celery with a lot of leaves • a handful of parsley • four medium russet potatoes First I chopped the tomato and put it in a bowl, then I peeled and chopped the garlic as finely as my patience allowed and added it to the tomato. Then I peeled the carrots and cut them crosswise as thinly as possible, directly into the bowl. (You can chop the carrots any which way and it will taste the same, but I think this looks better.) Then I chopped the celery leaves, and sliced the stalk portion in half the long way, and then chopped them in. I chopped the parsley. I prefer flat-leafed parsley, especially in soups, but didn’t have any, so I used the curly-leafed kind. Then I gave the ingredients a stir with my knife and turned my attention to the spuds, which I washed, peeled, and washed again, and then sliced crosswise about a quarter of an inch thick. After the beans had cooked for about an hour, I dumped everything into the pan. I added a generous amount of salt and several shakes of black pepper, and then some dry purple basil. How much? I’m not sure. The basil I have is in leaf form, and I grind it up with my fingers over the pan until it “looks right.” It might be enough to fill a tablespoon, maybe a little more. After those seasonings were in, I added four or five tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. Then I stirred everything together and lowered the heat so the beans would simmer rather than bubble too vigorously. After all, no one likes vigorously bubbled beans. About an hour and a half and a few stirrings later, the beans were done. I turned off the heat and closed the lid. We served them a couple of hours later. The beans were tasty, and very colorful and appealing. Everyone had a bowl or two, then we moved on to the rest of the meal — which, for the life of me, I can no longer remember. Hmm. Might be a side effect of the beans.	Also by William Michaelian POETRY Winter Poems ISBN: 978-0-9796599-0-4 52 pages. Paper. —————————— Another Song I Know ISBN: 978-0-9796599-1-1 80 pages. Paper. —————————— Cosmopsis Books San Francisco Signed copies available Main Page Author’s Note Background Notebook A Listening Thing Among the Living No Time to Cut My Hair One Hand Clapping Songs and Letters Collected Poems Early Short Stories Armenian Translations Cosmopsis Print Editions Interviews News and Reviews Highly Recommended Favorite Books & Authors Useless Information Conversation Flippantly Answered Questions E-mail & Parting Thoughts
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Let’s Eat — A Writer’s Guide to Cooking