Beans the new Smart Food?

Who knows   But last week after reading Julie’s post raving about some local dried beans she had recently tried, I got a yen for bean soup in a bad way.  So I picked some up last weekend at our favorite farmer’s market – Idylwilde Farms .    Saturday I rinsed and soaked them overnight.  Then Sunday morning I dumped them into the crockpot slow cooker, tossed in some fresh chopped onions, celery and carrots, added the leftover ham from Easter that I had stuck in the freezer and chopped up some fresh kielbasa, along with some fresh thyme and sage that I chopped up, and  finally some course fresh grated black pepper and a wee bit of salt.

These are the beans I used

I did plan on taking photos of the finished soup, but that just didn’t happen.  I did share some with my mom and dad, and today I get to eat the last bowl for lunch.  It was really good too.  Julie was right about the beans.  I even picked up a bag of Great Northern Beans so I think I just might dive into making Boston Baked Beans this weekend.

I did manage to get to both of my knitting groups this week – Sunday in Nashua and last night at the Java Room.  The Isis Shawl is currently in timeout, I got through the first repeat, but need to think about proceeding.  The alpaca Cindy brought back from Peru is lovely.  So I had to fess up that I’ve been knitting Swiffer covers out of kitchen cotton for this past week.  But that had got old fast.  I need something fairly mindless to knit because my focus is way off lately, but I wanted to knit something lacy, so I opted to start another shawl with some Knitpicks  (I think it’s alpaca cloud) .  The pattern is from Knitting Lace Triangles by Evelyn Clark – I started with the leaf lace pattern and when I get tired of that I will switch to something else, but currently it’s working for me.

I saw this test on someone’s blog this morning (sorry I cannot recall who’s blog – my mind is swiss cheese lately).  I was shocked when I ran it against my blog… who knew!?  LOL! Maybe it is the beans!