101. When I eat at my mama’s house, I usually have more butterbeans for dessert.

That concludes “Butterbean Week” at …slowly she turned.

Judge Butter Bean scraped his chair as he leaned back from the crusty table in Stumpy’s Saloon in West Texas. “Bring me butterbeans!” he shouted. “I just penned a letter to the lovely Miss Lima Langtry and it has whetted my appetite!”

Stumpy desperately flung open all the cabinets in the kitchen. He fished around the bottom of every barrel in the place. “Ah ha! Thanks be to Jesus, I thought I was a danged dead man for sure.”

He gingerly set a bowl of steaming large brown beans in front of the Judge, whose head was tilted back and snoring in the torpid heat.

“Huh..wha’ that smell…”

Judge Butter Bean snapped forward and looked at the pasty beige beans in front of him. They were each about the size of a fifty-cent piece. He raised his head and gave old Stumpy the squinty eye. Then he shot Stumpy right between the eyeballs.

“That’s how we deal with butterbean fraud in Texas,” Judge Butter Bean roared. “Deputy Fife, get me on the next train to North Carolina. Somebody there knows the difference between a dried up piece of cardboard and a tasty, tiny, kidney-shaped, grasshopper green or speckled purple, juicy, delicious BUTTERBEAN!”

When I am dead and in my grave,
No more butterbeans will I crave.
And on my tombstone I want it wrote
10,000 butterbeans went down my throat!

(Click the picture to learn more about ‘em)

I sure do wish I could say that I wrote this fine poem, but nope. I have carried it in my wallet for years, though.

Here’s another great butterbean poem!

UPDATE from Billy the Blogging Poet’s LaureateKids.com: Butter Bean On A Biscuit?

Yes, we here at …slowly she turned want to be YOUR butterbean station. Send us your butterbean literature. We may be silly, but we’re sincere about our butterbeans.

1. I have six cats that are like children to me.

2. My husband is my seventh child.
3. We enjoy being children together.
4. I am typing this on a ten-year-old computer that I am too stubborn to give up.
5. I snarled at my husband when he replaced the 15″ monitor with a 17″ monitor.
6. I have been playing a DOS game called Empire for about 14-15 years now.
7. I’m just a trifle reluctant to try new things.
8. Ten years ago I would have been happy just to have a 40-hour M-F desk job by now.
9. Five years ago I thought I’d be a professional Web designer by now.
10. Three years ago I thought I’d be in the loony bin by now.
11. Two years ago I would have been happy to have a 40-hour M-F desk job AND co-workers who didn’t give me migraines by now.
12. One year ago I realized that I’d made it and things were gonna be okay.
13. I got my B.A. in drama 22 years ago.
14. I have seen one play since, only because a friend’s husband was in it, and it wasn’t very good.
15. I am a graduate student in a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program.
16. Money is not important to me.
17. Saving the environment is important to me.
18. I’m an artist but since I began blogging I’ve thrown all my creativity into that.
19. I am a lapsed tapestry weaver.
20. I am a maker of jewelry, but I wear very little jewelry.
21. I don’t wear make-up.
22. I’m twenty pounds overweight.
23. I used to care, but I’m okay with it now.
24. I would wear T-shirts, jeans, and flip-flops everywhere if given the option.
25. I was a boy until I turned eleven.
26. I am a recovering agoraphobic.
27. I used to smoke a pack and a half of cigarettes a day.
28. I quit smoking ten years ago.
29. I am a farmer’s daughter.
30. My garden is my refuge.
31. I hate to sweat.
32. I can’t believe that I tested as an INTJ. Twice.
33. Yet I am a proud liberal who thinks that tax-supported government programs made this country great.
34. I am a 5 with a strong 4-wing on the Enneagram, meaning that I’m 60% hermit computer geek and 40% neurotic drama queen.
35. Governor’s School East, 1978, English.
36. I didn’t really believe in my heart that being smart was a good thing until I was around 35.
37. I’ll kick your butt in Scrabble. Come on, it’s go time.
38. I have a thick Southern drawl. It makes some people think I’m stupid.
39. I just learned to like olives this year.
40. If it wasn’t for seafood, I easily could go vegetarian.
41. I don’t eat veal or lamb.
42. I don’t eat factory-farmed meat and poultry.
43. I eat Peter Pan peanut butter straight out of the jar.
44. I am addicted to Pepsi One.
45. I once watched “American Idol” for ten minutes.
46. Except for those ten minutes, to my knowledge I have never watched any reality shows.
47. A new Star Wars movie. Ho-hum.
48. A new season of “The Sopranos.” When? When does it start? Huh? Huh? Is it time yet?
49. I’m beginning to look like my mother.
50. I would like to get rid of half of my possessions.
51. I would like to get rid of my husband’s jet ski and buy two canoes.
52. I love Lyle Lovett and Bela Fleck.
53. I might not look you in the eye when I talk to you. Please don’t hold it against me; I probably don’t realize what I’m doing, and I’ve been working on it for years.
54. My husband calls me Lori. My name is Laurie.
55. Even though we’ve been together 20 years now.
56. I’m fascinated with the idea of doing more with less.
57. Yet we have four computers in this room right now.
58. I like to drink beer.
59. I am very allergic to perfume.
60. Once I had my photo, large and in color, on the front of the Life section of the News and Record. The caption was “The Agony of Defeat.” No, I didn’t save any copies.
61. It was taken at a pinball tournament, a game at which I used to excel.
62. I also used to excel at tennis.
63. Now I excel at Microsoft Excel.
64. The caption under my baby picture at my mother’s obstetrician’s office: “Liz Taylor’s got nothing on me!”
65. I daydream about living in, outside of, near, or closer to Asheville.
66. As a child, I read “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass” to the end and turned back to the first page dozens of times.
67. I am a lapsed 18th century re-enactor.
68. I’m afraid of flying, but I’m going to Tuscany next year anyway.
69. If you don’t understand what I mean, I’m probably trying to be funny. It’s okay, just laugh.
70. I’m trying to learn patience, but it’s taking so freakin’ long!
71. I have bad skin. See #59.
72. Women have broken my heart more often and more deeply than men.
73. I have never ever said the words, “I am a people person,” in a job interview.
74. I am honest to a fault.
75. Next to my DH, Squirt the Buddha Kitty claims my heart.
76. I have missed out on some really great events because I don’t like crowds.
77. I don’t know what people are talking about half the time because I watch so little TV and listen to NPR. Is this good or bad?
78. I daydream about living off the grid, growing my own food and living off my creative talents.
79. I’m not tough enough.
80. But I do like tofu.
81. I’m not afraid of spiders when I’m awake. Usually.
82. I am lightly medicated.
83. I hate shopping for shoes.
84. I think that people who don’t support full civil rights for gays and lesbians need to get to know more openly gay people.
85. I can pick up a soccer ball with my toes.
86. I played bells and baritone saxophone in high school.
87. I am childless by choice.
88. I am one of the whitest white people I know.
89. I love rocks.
90. Smart, pleasant Republicans totally freak me out.
91. I daydream about owning a used bookstore.
92. I never know who’s in the Super Bowl or the World Series. Is that bad?
93. I was a spelling bee contender, but nerves got the best of me at the state level three years in a row.
94. I have an easel and oil paints set up in the next room, gathering dust.
95. My favorite D&D character’s name was Argentina Brunetti.
96. I want to eat dinner at Sushi 101 tonight.
97. Seriously, please take the money you were going to spend on me for Christmas and give it to charity.
98. But I’ll take a back rub. Or a plate of chocolate chip cookies.
99. A “B” is a “D.” A “C” is an “F.”
100. For my superhuman ability, I pick talking to animals.

I’m glad to report that I had a very relaxing time at the beach. It’s been a long time since I’ve been down there during the summer, and an even longer time since I’ve been down there with a four-year-old. It gives you an entirely different perspective about fun. I thought that it would be too hot, but I forgot that the ocean breeze keeps you cool. It was much hotter here.

Calabash is just bananas during the summer now. Even on Thursday night it was manic. Because we had a hungry four-year-old boy with us, we went to a spot that was not crowded, and understood why after we got our food. Although it was nice to know that it would definitely be warm enough to play in the water, I think that I greatly prefer going down there in the fall. And as much as I love the Sunset Beach drawbridge, now that I’ve experienced the Saturday exodus, I can understand why the government insists on a new bridge. I just hope that they preserve this one as well.

Mama and I had some very good chat time, and did some consignment store and gallery shopping, then she left on Friday. (Had to work on Saturday morning.) Marietta is just off Hwy 904 on my way back to Greensboro, so I went ahead with part of the original plan and stopped by her house. I spent an hour picking butterbeans and peas, and when she got off work she helped me by cutting okra. We didn’t get around to picking blueberries because I had somewhere to be at 6 p.m. But I got to have lunch with my brother, and Mama made a blueberry pie.

Blueberry tip from Mama: Don’t wash them until you’re ready to eat or cook them. Freeze them without washing them. Store them in the refrigerator in an uncovered container, not a sealed plastic bag.

I returned to weirdness. This summer has been like that. Just when I think everything is wonderful and I’m happy as a clam, an trickle of uneasiness begins to leak through. Something bad is coming. I hope that this is my annual August panic beginning a little early rather than intuition. And if it is either one, I hope that it will wait until after next weekend, because I can’t get my money back for the hotel room in Charlottesville. Not the smartest decision I ever made, there.

I’ll probably post some more about Sunset Beach later, mainly photos.

Usually at this time of year, my head fills with visions of rows of jars in the cupboard and neatly stacked plastic bags in the freezer. In my heart, I am a survivalist. I’d love to be a pioneer homesteader, raising all the things I need to live. I try to keep the pantry stocked, and I am a thrifty re-user of things that others would toss in the trash can. Pennies scream and run away when they see my fingers approach.

Some people fantasize about getting new cars and furniture. I fantasize about what I’m going to do when the oil runs out.

Back in the real world, I have a small backyard garden, and it doesn’t produce enough of anything in large quantities to make canning worthwhile or necessary. That’s partly because I love variety, and the look of my garden is as important as the function. I have produced scads of salad greens, which I can’t preserve, and parsley, which can be dried, but who needs that much dried parsley?

My childhood summers were filled with picking, shelling, snapping, shucking, silking, blanching, freezing, and canning vegetables. Don’t get the wrong idea. I was a very spoiled child, especially compared to my friends who spent their summers in tobacco fields and barns. Until I moved to Greensboro, the only store-bought canned vegetables I was familiar with were peas and mushrooms. My first taste of cafeteria canned corn was a real shock to my system. Suddenly I LIKED Mama’s vegetables - the very same ones I’d rejected a year before.

We filled three large freezers at our house and at the farm shop with frozen butterbeans, field peas, okra, corn, blueberries, fish, and shrimp. (Once there was a six foot long rattlesnake on top in one of them, but that’s another story.) In addition to the farm, my father owned a little ragtag marina on the Intercoastal Waterway near Calabash that serviced shrimp boats, so we got our shrimp really fresh. He was also a legendary fisherman of red drum. Mama canned pickles, green beans, apples, and tomatoes. In the hot afternoon, we sat in a group in front of the TV, snapped beans, shelled peas and butterbeans, and watched “Days of Our Lives.” The cooler times of day were for picking vegetables and fruits, bagging shrimp, shucking corn, and boiling water in the kitchen.

Anyway, these memories led me to perusing the Internet for pressure canners. I thought, as I often do, that I could buy tomatoes and other veggies in bulk and can them - a less energy-intensive way of preserving, and one that could presumably be done without using any petroleum-based energy at all if push came to shove. On my journey through Internet consumer land, I was led astray from my goal and bought a food dehydrator instead. Apparently these get hawked a lot on TV, because I’ve received a good bit of ribbing about it.

I went to Deep Roots and bought an organic pineapple, organic cherries, and organic plums. They filled the house with heavenly aroma as they dried. But I was disappointed. The pineapple strips seemed to be a small return on a $4.50 purchase. They taste great, but they don’t look like the dried pineapple I buy at the store. The plums are so sour I can hardly eat them. And the cherries taste like sour raisins.

I hope that this purchase will not join the juicer at the back of one of the bottom kitchen cabinets. I am going to use it instead of the microwave to dry herbs, since hanging herbs to dry in my house is an invitation for cat hair in your food. This week I plan to try apple slices dipped in lemon juice. Maybe my sights were set too high by starting off with high-faluting fruit.

This Friday I plan to go to Mama’s and “help” her with her garden. I’ll come back with a bunch of okra and hopefully some other produce. But the main thing I am after is to pick her brain about canning and preserving. I’m going to re-read my copy of Putting Food By. Then I am going to buy that pressure canner and pickle some okra. And I swaney that nothing is going to divert me from my goal this time.

This is a tale of an ordinary miracle.

About ten years ago, my friend D and I decided to take his kids for a relaxing float down the Dan River on a hot summer morning. We rented tubes, piled onto a truck that dropped us off a few miles upriver, and settled in for a peaceful ride.

About fifteen minutes downriver, D says, “Uh, I hate to say this, but I’ve lost my keys.”

“KEYS!” I lowered my voice. “What do you mean, keys? You brought your car keys on the river?”

“Yeah, they were in my pocket, but now they’re gone.”

Deciding that it was pointless to backtrack and start a search, we agreed not to tell the kids so that at least they’d have a good time. We silently and grumpily floated on, living in that future moment when we would return to the car.

Our cash and credit cards were locked in the car. Efforts to get in failed. AAA told me that it would be midnight before they could get a locksmith to us. D’s wife was in Cape Cod, and my husband was an indentured servant at K-Mart. We scrounged enough money for a couple of sodas and packs of crackers for the kids and watched them play in the water. The sun began to go down and the girls began to get cold and upset. Finally my husband came to our rescue, and helped D climb a balcony at his apartment in Greensboro to break into his home and retrieve his other set of keys.

The next day, I drove D back up to Danbury to get his car. As we wearily trudged back to the same store where we had spent hours the day before, a voice from the tube rental booth called out, “Hey! Aren’t you the guy who lost his keys yesterday?”

Another tuber had found them in the river, and had turned them in just ten minutes before we arrived. I told D that I couldn’t figure out whether he was the luckiest or the unluckiest S.O.B. I had ever known.

Not only had some stranger stepped on his keys in a river, picked them up, and turned them in, BUT if we had arrived 15 minutes earlier, or if that rental booth attendant had not noticed us 20 feet away through all the hubbub surrounding him in the five minute window that we were there, D never would have seen those keys again. Each factor in the scenario was critical.

He almost missed it by that much.

The moral of this story: Amazing small coincidences shape our lives all the time. This incident had little impact on anything after those two days, OR DID IT? Would the loss of those keys have caused the river of D’s life to shift ever so subtly into a different course? Did the person who found the keys forget to turn them in at first, and then by pausing to turn back to give them to the attendant, avoid a disaster?

The web of our connections is largely invisible to us, but it is constantly expanding and changing the direction of the universe. Those coincidences are threads interwoven into the larger scheme of fate. Each thread is vital to the structure of the fabric.

And it’s not a bad idea to keep at least one of those threads firmly knotted to your keys if you are floating down a river!

There’s a complicated love-hate relationship in my house with squash. My husband hates it, IF he knows that he is eating it. Presented chopped up with lots of herbs and a bit of guile, it’s not a problem.

For me, squash and corn are the veggies that I eagerly await each summer. Tragically, they’re also the vegetables that I have the most trouble growing in my backyard garden. If you have followed my garden posts, you’ll recall that I refused to be called a green thumb before I harvested at least two squash from my garden. Well, that happened this past week - I even made it to three!

One of my favorite treats is yellow squash, sliced potato chip thin, dusted with flour and pan-fried so that they are crisp on the edges and sweet and tender in the middle. I only allow myself to do this once a year, as I’ve tried to get away from my childhood food tradition of frying vegetables.

I’m going to a Slow Food potluck this afternoon, and I’m taking one of my favorite dishes, Squash Casserole. I kept experimenting with different variations of this traditional Southern dish until I got the one that I liked the most. This is it:

4 cups chopped yellow squash
1/2 cup chopped Vidalia onion
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup milk
1 T flour
salt and pepper to taste
2 dozen crumbled (Ritz-like) crackers, divided
1 c grated extra sharp cheddar cheese, divided
butter

Cook the squash and onion together until tender, drain, and cool. Preheat the oven to 350. Mix all the ingredients together except butter, half the crackers and half the cheese. Put in a lightly buttered casserole dish. Sprinkle the other half of the cracker crumbs and cheese on top and dot with butter. Cook for 40 minutes.

Notes: You can substitute other cooked vegetables in this dish. I added some corn scraped off a leftover cob from dinner last night. I’ve also added carrots and broccoli.

Origins:

Good news: One of the fig cuttings from my mother’s tree sprouted leaves today! We had given them up for dead, but since we’re messy, hadn’t bothered to empty the containers. Hooray for being a slob!

Bad news: My apple tree died.

Good news: There are shoots coming up from the base of it.

Bad news: I don’t know what to do about it.

Good news: My Jellybean tomatoes are turning red almost faster than I can pick them!

Bad news: The Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter tomatoes seem to be struggling. And I gave them most of my big tomato space, putting major pressure on my one Brandywine to perform.

Good news: Juliets came back from last year on their own and already have a bunch of green tomatoes. Four O’Clocks came back on their own and are blooming.

Bad news: I don’t think the foxgloves are gonna bloom at all.

Good news: I got a little butternut squash on the vine!

Bad news: It rotted and fell off.

Good news: The pattypan squashes are producing like crazy!

Bad news: I don’t really like pattypan squashes.

Good news: Green beans and eggplants and peppers and Sungold tomatoes!

Bad news: I left the Tercel’s windows down and now it’s full of mosquitoes.

More bad news: A big-ass wolf spider is hiding in the non-functional radio.

Good news: Sounds like there’s evidence now that Karl Rove outed Valerie Plame.

Bad news: He’ll probably come out smelling like a skunk cabbage, but keep his job.

Good news: I’m happy, happy, and happy and I haven’t had a drop of alcohol! Just the company of a good husband and good friends today.

Here’s a simple side dish that I took to a cook-out the other night. It’s very easy and flexible. Just use whatever root vegetables you have on hand.

I used red and russet potatoes, beets, and carrots harvested from my garden (above). I added a sweet potato, some Yukon Gold potatoes, two small Vidalia onions, and several unpeeled cloves of garlic. (All from the farmer’s market or Deep Roots, all organic!) Cut them into small chunks about the same size. Peel them if you like. I peeled some and left some skins on. Throw in several sprigs of rosemary and any other herbs you like. Salt and pepper and toss with enough olive oil to coat the vegetables.

Roast them in a single layer for 20 minutes at 400 F in the largest roasting pan you have. They need to have a little room. Check to see if they’re tender with a fork and cook a little longer and add more oil if necessary. Mine turned pretty black on top but they were still good. That’s why you see a photo of the veggies before they were cooked. It wasn’t very pretty, but I didn’t care after I tasted them! Serve them in a beautiful handmade bowl - go for the rustic peasant look.

I especially liked the beets cooked this way. I have a feeling that beets are going to be my new favorite vegetable this year.