Green Beans to Soup Beans

Despite the very spotty germination on my Kentucky Wonder green bean plants that resulted in exactly nine plants growing to maturity this year, I have actually been harvesting green beans. I have two gallon-sized bags of green beans in the freezer right now, thus ensuring my favorite green beans+bacon+onions for Thanksgiving dinner.

Of course, given the fact that I never did put up fencing for the plants to climb, I also have a lot of beans that get lost in the jungle and grow too much before I harvest them. This makes them tough and starchy. Not what I want to a green bean to be.

But it IS what I want a soup bean to be.

Green bean on the right, soup bean on the left.

"Soup beans" are what I call those green beans that over-mature on the plant before I find them. Some of those over-mature ones I leave to dry out, and then I save them to plant for next year. But most of them, I freeze as soup beans. 

It takes me a few days to harvest enough beans to bother with, but when I do have enough, I go through them and separate them into green beans and soup beans based on their size. All of them get the stem ends snapped off. The green beans are frozen whole. The soup beans are chopped into short lengths before being frozen.

Like so.

And then I have a bag of bean pieces ready to just throw right into soup when I make it.

Soup beans in soup.

I have about a quart of soup beans in the freezer right now, and I'll just keep adding to it as long as the plants are still producing beans and I keep missing them until they're too big.

Snapshots: Spirit Time

As the daylight hours grow ever shorter, the candles on the table have reappeared.

Before-school breakfast candles.

I do have new taper candles, but they're not 100% beeswax. The children love the smell of the real beeswax candle stub that's still in the candle holder, so I continue to burn it for them. It apparently gives them the strength to face the school day, and who am I to deny them that?

This past week was a spirit week at school for homecoming at the school we play sports with. I don't usually have enough spirit to really enjoy spirit weeks, but I was pretty proud of Poppy's hair for crazy hair day on Monday.

Pigtails on the sides, plus a bun on top surrounded by cosmos. 

The flowers made it to after lunch before wilting and starting to fall off, which is pretty good for a seven-year-old running around at recess and so on.

Later in the week on the day for our school colors, the cheerleaders were instructed to wear their giant sparkly hair bows.

Spirited cheerleader at breakfast (with the strengthening candles burning, you'll notice).

And then they cheered at the homecoming volleyball game.

A bevy of bows.

In non-homecoming news, I wrote a thank-you note to the girls at school who gave us the apple butter a couple of weeks ago, and they responded by giving me another jar of apple butter. Sometimes virtue really is its own reward.

The apple butter is good on regular old sourdough bread, but I suspected it would be even better on this slightly sweet oat quick bread, so I made a couple of loaves of that.

And so it was. If you have apple butter around, I encourage you to try it.

I was at the store on Tuesday, and some random guy passing my cart glanced in and said, "Whoa, that's a big ground beef."

I guess. I was thinking I should have bought two. My sense of scale is way off with food anymore. He did not remark on the two giant bags of Crispy Rice cereal, however.

While I was in that city, I stopped to go in a very old church there that I had never seen. It took me a second to figure this out when I walked in.

Clearly marked, but how to access the holy water?

After a second of examination, I deduced that I needed to put my finger underneath the wooden box to activate the holy water, which then dripped onto my finger. I can see the practicality of this obvious COVID-holdover, but I did feel a bit like I was in a public bathroom waiting on an automatic soap dispenser.

I found a few more sunflowers on my run the other day.

Along with some white cosmos from the garden and some of what my kids call "cotton grass."

I still don't see a freeze in our forecast, so it's possible I may be able to find sunflowers for a little while yet. They're certainly getting more scarce, though.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.