It’s not what you think.  {and all the readers breathed a collective sigh of relief}

It’s just that last night I put beans in a bowl to soak, and then I woke up to beans that were threatening to overtake my kitchen. {Wow, Laura. Fascinating.}

See, when you add water to beans – they grow.  They grow and they grow and they grow. So if you aren’t thinking about what you’re doing, and you scoop 13 cups of beans into a bowl, then cover the beans with water before you go to bed – beware of the growing bean monster which will greet you when you walk into your kitchen to make breakfast.

I strained the beans and added fresh water, but of course, none other than my largest stock pot would hold the monster.

Why, you ask? Why so many beans?

I told you already. I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing.  I needed a large amount of beans for a big batch of chili, so I just kept scooping. I also forgot that beans in a bowl will soak up the water until they become bloated and ready to burst. Whoa, good morning, beans.  That. That is what I said when I walked into my kitchen this morning to find the bloated beans trying to crawl over the top of the bowl onto my counter top and floor.

I didn’t really tell the beans good morning. I don’t talk to my chili beans. Coffee beans, though – for sure. Don’t even doubt that one.

After cooking the chili beans (which of course bubbled up and overflowed onto my stove-top because I forgot that they were cooking and because there were so many of them), I realized that I had way, way too many cooked beans for the big batch of chili I was planning to make. All I’m doing is trying to do is to be prepared to feed our high school youth group on Sunday night, see? But we’re going out of town Thursday afternoon and won’t get home until late Saturday night. And I don’t know if you knew this or not, but we have to change our clocks this Saturday night, so we lose an hour of sleep.  No one asked my permission to do that this weekend.  This is not okay with me.

So in my effort to get ahead, I got very, very ahead. I have beans for chili on Sunday night to feed an army. Plus I now have three other big containers of beans in my freezer to be used another time. Yay me. I am so efficient.

It seems that I just spent 404 words telling you about my beans – as if I have nothing better to talk about. Blah, blah, blah, beans. Wow everyone. Look at my beans.

So now I shall leave you with this important reminder and advice:

Do not become distracted when you are scooping beans. Stop scooping beans if you know what’s good for you. But if you forget and over-scoop, simply go ahead and freeze your cooked beans for future use.

526 words to tell you that you can freeze beans. Sometimes I amaze myself.