Botany within your reach - 4. bean seeds

Once again those wonderful people over at the Botanist in the Kitchen blog have beaten TPP to the punch, to the pulse. So here you go Botany within your reach - 4. Bean seeds.  As my colleagues note this is International year of pulses.  Hmm, thought it was the Year of the Monkey?  Ah, that's the ticket, time for a plant astrological calendar.  2016 -year of the pulse (old name for a bean or legume).  TPP will have to think about this for a time. And believe it or else this is exactly what TPP was working on for his next offering.  Maybe we should coordinate our efforts.  In his defense TPP has been way too busy giving presentations on tree ID in the winter and evolutionary thinking. Guess when you're giving it away the price seems right.  So, soak up some beans, peas, and lentils and have a go at this month's botany lab.  And you can also compare parts with whole roasted peanuts.  So now we ask the un-crucial question, are split peas split? 

Chili has no beans, a topic with plenty of heat

"The chief ingredients of all chili are fiery envy, scalding jealousy, scorching contempt and sizzling scorn." (H. A. Smith, 1967, Holiday).  Sounds like this guy has participated in a chili cook-off or two. The Texas people of my acquaintance are pretty diverse, but they do agree that beans have no place in chili, let alone adding macaroni or scorn, sorry, corn. What passes for chili in Cincinnati is beneath contempt. To his credit, TPP does not claim to know more about chili than you do, but he has won the local Texas Independence Day chili cook-off held around here, the only non-Texan to ever do so, and to claim the prize he had to swear he would seek Lone-star citizenship.  He'd have won a 2nd time but for irregularities in the voting (Texas politics as usual).  This is a good time of  year for a bowl of chili, and TPP's best invention was made when he slipped a bit with the cumin and decided what the heck go for that east Texas flavor, that far eastern Texas flavor, as in more like curry-flavored chili. It had plenty of depth and authority to be sure. TPP also makes a mean pot of beans especially when they are cooked in a huge cast iron Dutch oven. But beans is beans. Now there was one couple from down on a bayou somewhere that used to make "road-kill swamp-water chili" and while you weren't quite sure what the meat was, or used to be, there sure weren't any beans. And it's hard to know what to call it when people make "vegetarian chili" probably using prime cuts from a tofudebeest. The only good thing about the Stupor Bowl is it's a good excuse to make some chili. HT to Slate for making TPP think about this. 

Beans versus nuts

Today's laboratory focuses on beans, legumes.  It's a fun lab with lots of cooking and disecting and eating.  Peanuts, the very name, cause a bit of confusion because they are not a nut at all but a pea in a pod, a dry indehiscent (does split open by itself) pod that grows under ground.  Of course this mornings news was all about nuts of the political persuasion.  Nuts who are obsessed with causing Obama to fail at any cost; nuts who will do any amount of damage to the USA to accomplish this goal.  In making this observation, it occurs to TPP that we might even say "pea-brained nuts" because none of this is very smart.  Indeed, the fear that Obama-care might work has spawned a disinformation campaign of epic proportions.  This however does demonstrate that ideology is no way to govern, and the GnOPe (the G is silent you recall) party continues to pursue their agenda because it's the will of the people, all 22%.  Wonder how many of my students even know what happened?