The Yellow House

The commuter train comes in all the way from West Virginia. Some of the people who ride it spend three hours, each way, commuting. That’s more time spent with your fellow train riders during the week than with your significant other or family. DC is a crazy commuting city, with long-suffering government servants slogging in and out for 25 years so they’re eligible for their federal pensions. In the mornings, people count down the days until they retire, and sometimes, you’ll hear the pop of a champagne cork: friends celebrating someone’s last schlep into work.

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I took a little holiday break from writing here but not from writing, which was an interesting experiment that caused me to descend into some pretty dark stuff that no one, trust me, wants to read. So! Happy new year. Let’s talk about beans and definitely not about feelings, feminism, guns, or country music.*

I don’t pretend to be any high arbiter of bean quality, but if you like food, we live in a golden age of beautiful, heirloom beans, no small thanks to seed savers and discoverers like Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo. Heirloom beans are worth the money, and sometimes I special order them for particular dishes or to have on hand for a treat. I could spend a long time convincing you of the merits of gorgeous Good Mother Stallards or Christmas limas. But beans are supposed to promise a triple threat of nutrition, rib-sticking satiety, and economy. And at $6+ a pound, heirlooms don’t exactly satisfy that last qualification. So let’s talk about budget-conscious beans. Enter the humble pinto.
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Sometimes the recipes that are real workhorses in our household evade documentation here. I discovered this dish early in 2013, when it was still frigid February, and in subsequent cold seasons have made it (or a variation on it) more times than I can count. By the time I realized, this year, it was such a keeper that I had to write about it, it was spring. And writing about warming things like braised lentils is anathema when there are green things sprouting. Now, though, there’s a chill in the air again. This recipe has bided its time.

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I entertain the big questions with frequency but allow them to slide away unanswered with equal frequency, which is one of the 3,798 reasons I should probably never bear children into the world. This is a roundabout way of getting to my point, which is Dear Stephanie, I apologize for taking so long to get back to you. Stephanie wrote me the kindest email weeks ago asking lots of questions, mostly answerable, except for one: How do you do it? » Click to read more