This Year's Shucked Beans--August 2023

 

The photo above is not great but it is the best I got at the time, about a week ago, near the middle of August 2023, when I was close to completing making shucked beans from two bushels of White Half Runners I had bought at what has become a relative deal of $30.00 per bushel in Floyd County Kentucky.  In past bad years, I have paid as much as $60.00 a bushel for good, clean Half Runners.  In the past, I have written on this blog about making and eating shucked beans which some people refer to as Leather Britches.  In recent years, I have been blessed to develop friendships with both Bill Best and Frank Barnett, two of the most experienced heritage bean experts in all of Appalachia.  I grew up eating and helping raise and make shucked beans in Knott County Kentucky.  Since I met both Bill and Frank, I have written a few other bean based blog posts including one about The Dog Eye Bean and The Eagle With Spreading Wings Bean, two of the most unique and colorful heritage beans in the region.  I also wrote another post called "Lazy Wife Greasy Beans, A Lesson In Appalachian Nomenclature", a post which I owe Bill Best for since he was the first to introduce me to the Lazy Wife Greasy Bean which has become one of my favorite beans at the supper table.  Also, indirectly from learning from Bill Best about the Cherokee Purple Tomato, I wrote a post about "Multi-Cropping In The Appalachian Garden", a post which was deeply rooted in my own childhood during which I helped my parents in our one acre garden to raise Irish Potatoes, Hickory King Corn, White Half Runner Beans, and Cushaws all in the same ground with the potatoes being planted, hoed twice and then having the corn and beans planted between the potato hills, and scattering Cushaw seeds here and there among the other three crops.  In short, I have always been interested in the traditional Appalachian food items on which I was raised.  But knowing Bill and Frank has increased both my knowledge and interest in traditional Appalachian Heritage Crops even though I stopped raising a garden several years ago due to both my intense work schedule as a substance abuse and mental health therapist and the serious health problems from which my wife Candice suffers.  Even though I don't garden currently, I buy traditional food stuffs any time I can, freeze quite a few items for winter consumption, and strive to learn as much as I can about those heritage crops.  Which brings me back to my freshly made shucked beans for 2023.  

I always make my shucked beans by stringing and breaking them and then drying them on a white sheet on my blacktop driveway until they rattle when I pick them up in the sheet to bring them into the house at night to be placed on an empty bed with a ceiling fan on the lowest setting circulating air over them at night.  This year, our 13 year old nephew, Connor Nehlson from Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, was visiting with us for a week and got his first lesson in how to string and break beans.  He did work consistently on two occasions for about an hour which might have been his best work performance of his life.  The average Appalachian child of my youth would have had some dressing down if that had been their production for a day but training a child to work is a work in progress and I think the hour's performance might have been close to a record for Connor.  We got a bit of rain on two of the days when the beans were drying and I had to bring them in the house on those days for time under the fan instead of in the sunshine. I can't prove it empirically but I firmly believe that  drying in the sunshine, as opposed to being dried in a food dehydrator or by some other means gives them a far better flavor.  And I told someone who responded to my post on a Facebook post about drying beans that "there is no sweeter sound on earth than that rattle when you pick up a sheet full of shucked beans off the driveway to bring them into the house to be individually packaged in freezer bags for winter storage.  There is also no better taste on earth than a pot of shucked beans which have been soaked overnight to re-hydrate them and then cooked slowly with a nice chunk of smoked hog jaw thrown in for extra flavor.  

Putting Up Peaches! Freezing.

 

For the past several years, I have bought fresh peaches from a Mennonite friend I know who travels with a truck and trailer to peach orchards in several states and sells peaches from his home in Crockett, Kentucky, in the Mennonite community in which I have so many friends and connections.  We freeze the peaches and use them during the winters for cobblers which are wonderful in cold weather.  We have also begun in the last year to fry peaches just as you would fried apples and they are also a great addition to a country breakfast and a nice flavor break from always eating apples.  Due to both the loss of quite a bit of food value and the extra labor involved, this year we decided to try freezing one half bushel box of peaches with the skins on instead of peeling them.  As a test, we made one cobbler with the first box of peaches we bought a few weeks ago without peeling them and it worked quite well.  I have always eaten fresh peaches skin and all and the idea of eating the skin has absolutely no negative connotations for me.   So yesterday, July 31, 2021, we decided to freeze our second half bushel of peaches with the skin intact.  The amount of waste, especially without hogs or chickens to eat the peelings, is incredibly smaller.  Where we usually have gotten seven bags of peaches, minus the few we eat, cook into a fresh cobbler, and a few to give to an elderly neighbor.  Without peeling the peaches, we got the same amount of eating, fresh cobbler peaches, and give away peaches, but had nine bags for the freezer.  That math makes a lot of sense.  I have to admit that we did not do any research about freezing peaches with the skin on before we attempted this which is not usually our first action.  This morning, after having already frozen the peaches, I have read a few articles on the internet from people who have regularly frozen them with the skin on and they all agree that they like it that way.  But one person said that peaches frozen with the skin on will shed the skin when they are thawed.  We will have to see how that turns out in a month or so when we eat our first bag of frozen peaches.  My niece in Kendallville, Indiana, who has frozen, dried, canned, and preserved food for many years in any way possible says that she uses a hot water bath with peaches to cause them to shed the skins before she freezes them.  We considered doing it that way but decided the extra labor with the hot water made it more attractive to just remove the pits, slice them, and freeze them.  Plus, there were two jobs when I was growing up which I hated with a passion and they were helping can beets and tomatoes because my mother used the hot water bath method to get the skins off the beets and tomatoes and that hot water in a three bushel tub was something that I never came to accept willingly.  I just did not want to repeat the experience with peaches.  

I can't wait until that first fall morning when we have fried peaches as a part of our breakfast.