Edamame

Instead of hitting the floor running, I decide to sit for thirty minutes after breakfast.  There are hash browns that litter the floor when my fork missed my mouth and a ketchup smear on my right leg when I bounced a fresh made french fry off my calf at lunch yesterday.  I'd like to think I'm not entering senior la-la land, just distracted.

I walked in the garage and opened the upright freezer to take a picture of yesterday.  Seventeen quart freezer bags jammed full of blanched soybeans.  That's a 14 gallon ( 53 liters) Tupperware tub of washed, sorted edamame-the Japanese word for soybean. It's an unknown out here in the sticks.  When one hasn't been any farther than Lacrosse and fresh sushi comes in plastic containers at Festival Foods or frozen at Wal-Mart, sushi is the equivalent of eating fat white maggots with a little sea salt to locals whose idea of a delicacy is cod made gelatinous with lye.

Mandy takes advantage of an open back door to sneak back to bed upstairs.  Her camo bed in the breezeway is a bit too cool at 7 am and 58 degrees.  Poochie the cat ambles in, brushing against my ankles for a fast snort of a raw chicken liver breakfast.  Then, it's back outside to prowl.  What a guy.

Jorge, Dawn and I harvest half of the half of the soybean patch while listening to a rebroadcast Prairie Home Companion and another program on WPR called  To The Best of Our Knowledge. The programer interviews a woman who's an authority on trees.  She's planted over a hundred varieties of trees on her property and enlightens us of the healing properties of trees.  I was out in the soybean patch hauling new stalks which we hold by the root and strip the pods from the plant so I didn't catch much more than Dawn's excited exclamations about Black Walnut Trees and the worth of a full grown walnut tree at harvest-$60K. 

The other half of the Shirofumi organic soybeans out there will be saved for seed next year. I'll blanch  as many as I have time to pick for shelled beans.  In December steamed edible podded soybeans coated with some coarse kosher salt or sea salt and a beer will top off a cold winter night.