Eating during the winter being fairly crucial for carbon-based life forms, almost all cultures have harvest celebrations at this time of year. True, some now surround football-watching as much as actual food gathering, but my own celebration is tactile and palate-based to the point that I might have to send in the Mac for repair because of the bounty. Indeed, I’m engaged at this second in a series of almost spiritual genuflections in an attempt to not drip gooey burrito fixin’s, most of them just-harvested from outside the Funky Butte Ranch House door, on my keyboard as I type this Dispatch of Culinary Thankfulness.
The centerpiece of my personal harvest celebratory dance is the overflowing supply of Anasazi beans, a variety whose back-story is nearly as tasty as the beans themselves. Someone not too long ago found a vat of these pinto-style protein factories in a Millennium-old painted ceramic urn tucked into a cave not far from here, and, lo and behold, they sprouted. Thank goodness that hiker wasn’t inside watching football –- a ritual in which I take part perhaps once or twice a year, when the commercials are most expensive and I feel an obligation to represent my extremely rare demographic (Neo-Rugged Individualist Organic Digital Age Cowboy).
Anyway, the ancient beans sprouted and now you find them in bulk at every crunchy co-op in the Southwest, and they grow, if not like a weed, then exactly like a bean that loves this climate. If the Anasazi Bean Council had as much advertising dough as the GMO Corn Council, the slogan we might see splashed all over health magazines Might Be, “Zero Carbon Miles For 1,400 Years™.” Indeed, I’m just part of a very long bean-growing tradition on this patch of land (which I hope and suspect was always called the contemporary dialect’s version of the Funky Butte Ranch). They practically grow by themselves. Trust me. I’m not a fellow born with a particularly green thumb.
And (oh, no, pause to elbow-wipe home-grown green chiles off the shift key) the beans this year are so plump and tasty that they are a stand-alone snack in themselves. Add some of the aforementioned Funky Butte Ranch green chiles, goat cheese and assorted greens, and well, you see why I have trouble ceasing chomping to type. The greatest pleasure, which won’t surprise any would-be locavore who has reproduced, is listening to my 16-month-old son scarf these just-plucked delicacies at the table across from my office desk. His vocabulary has been getting increasingly nuanced, and he keeps looking at me with a face no more food-smeared than mine and saying, almost singing, “Yum yum!”
Two Yums Up. Wow. Accent on the second syllable. That means, “A subtle meatiness on the palate which only gets more sophisticated with the interplay of fresh goat cheese and crayons.” Read more…