shopping, and 20-bean soup

Yesterday when I might have been blogging, I was at a holiday party and then at IKEA. I'd been thinking for 20 years that surely southeast Michigan could support an IKEA. We finally got one in June, and yesterday was the first time I visited it.

What a great store. So many cool things, excellent design, and lots of bright colors. I really fell in love with my shopping cart -- all four wheels swiveled! It moved so easily in every direction.... It looked just like a standard grocery cart, so I would forget how nicely it moved until I started off to look at the next thing, and then I was happy all over again.

People say I'm hard to please, can you believe it?


I was going to blog my new best friend -- the construction guy who fixed it so I can let the dogs out in the back yard, calloo, calay. Unfortunately about half of our back yard is now mud, from the construction digging and so on. DH and I went to get mulch yesterday. We got as much as we could bear to shovel (into "yard waste" bags), 6 bushels worth, the guy at the recycle/composting place thought), and that covered about a third of the muddy area. We'll have to get some more, I think.......


And last night, when I could have been on the computer, I just wanted to go to bed with a novel, so that's what I did.

I haven't been out to take pics of the mud/mulch yet, so here's the soup I made last week.

I got some two bags of mixed beans at the grocery, and used them to make a batch of soup.

The two bags were right next to each other on the grocery shelf, and I was surprised that they had different kinds of beans. Mostly the same, but each bag had a few varieties that were not in the other bag.

It makes me happy to make soup from 20 different kinds of legumes!

I don't even know the names of several of these. So many little white ones. That pale green, almost spherical one (which got bright green when it soaked!). The teeny black one. The cream colored one with the caramel splotch.

















Aren't they beautiful? It makes me happy to eat such beautiful food. Of course they are more dramatic here than after they are cooked. The splotchy ones lose their splotches (except the black-eyed peas, which keep theirs), and some of the other colors fade, but I know they looked like this.....

Isn't it excellent that so many different legumes are being grown? The richness and variety of our world are surely to be savored.....