Monday, February 25, 2008

Second Thoughts...

Yeah, already having second thoughts about having a blog. It's not so much that it goes against my general belief that blogs are absolute shit and it's arrogant to think that your life is so much more interesting than everyone else's that people want to read about it...it's more the fact that if I post everything interesting online, my life will no longer be interesting.

Example: Saturday night I attempted to make something simple for dinner. I figured some potatoes and kidney beans boiled with bullion would be pretty easy to make...something I could throw in a pot, set the stove to 7 and go poke at every few minutes. I can't leave anything alone when I cook, as I constantly have to test it. Even boiling spaghetti, I have to eat 3-4 noodles to see if it's done even though I know that it hasn't been in long enough. I cut baked potatoes in half so I can get in there with a fork and eat some of the center. It could be a sign that I'm impatient, or it could just be because I'm fat. Or maybe I'm fat because I'm impatient? That doesn't make any sense, but if it did, it would be something to think about.

Anyways, about 40 minutes go by and I can tell just by looking that the kidney beans are still as hard as getting your hands on today's copy of New York Magazine (finally, no more embarassing "lilo nip slip" appearing under 'recent searches!') After an hour, they're soft enough to spear with a fork and eat, still a bit tough. I was hoping to have eaten by now, so I go a quick google search about dried beans, and discover that a dried bean has to soak anywhere from 3-4 hours before they're readying something something pressure cooker something poisonous toxins. While the thought of using a pressure cooker captivated my imagination, I skipped to the toxic poison part.

Apparently most beans contain Phytohaemagglinutnin, which from what I read seems to be latin for "causes severe vomitting after three hours, which then subsides to onslaughts of diarrhea." This toxin is highly concentrated in red kidney beans, and as few as 4-5 raw beans will cause you to yearn for death's sweet embrace for several hours. Boiling the beans for 10 minutes will break down 99.99% of this toxin, but it's funny to think that kidney beans are gastrological Death Stars.

So here I am trying to recall how many beans I ate at each test phase of boiling, just waiting and dreading what could be, calculating out how many hours of sleep I can get before I have to coach at noon, figuring that the expulsion of my innards will start in 1-3 hours and the symptoms will last 5-8. The worst part being, after all of the bleeding steaks, raw burgers, undercooked pork, and other vindictive meals that can only be contrived after drinking beers all day in the sun then later attempting to grill by twilight, my bout with food poisoning would be caused by an undercooked bean.

But back to the point. This blog will preempt all conversations. If I do all of my ranting here, I will lose all my friends, as they'll have already heard my various non-adventures. I'll start to jabber away, they're just going to go "Yeah, the kidney beans, whatever, I already read about it... and did you ever get sick or what? That story was horribly written in the sense that we never did find out what happened."

And, perhaps, they never will...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't you remember when dad made chili and didn't soak the beans and we all got realllly sick from it? Except me, cause I didn't eat the chili.

Goody said...

Soaking doesn't get rid of the chemical, boiling does. And no.