Burn Baby Burn

I had it all set.  I had beans in a pot on the stove cooking for dinner, and I was going to hide in my bed with a book for a couple of hours until the kids started coming home.  I had a hot water bottle, some tea, a brand new book, ibuprofen, and I was going to do my best to ignore the misery of feminine organs that don't work quite right.  I don't talk about it much, but boy, I wish there was a way to tell your body, "Hey, I don't need these parts anymore.  You are dysfunctional, and I don't like you.  Thanks for the four kids, but we should really break up."

I haven't figured it out yet, but if I do....

Anyway.  Moving on.

The book was good.  It was a light, funny, engaging read- the perfect kind of book for my day.  (It's called Clandestine by Nichole Van, if anyone is interested.)  It was so good, or perhaps my bedroom was too far away from the kitchen, that I failed to notice the smell until it was too late.

In my haste to bury my sorrows in a book, I failed to turn down the burner down to low.  I had turned the temperature down, but not low enough.  The liquid had long since boiled away, and the beans were getting harder and blacker by the minute.

I generally consider myself a decent cook.  Burning things isn't usually a failing of mine.  But today, I more than made up for it.  I guess sometimes you need to fail spectacularly to keep you humble.

I emptied out the pot of the beans that looked halfway decent, and was going to chip the black stuff off the bottom in hopes to salvage at least some of dinner.  But they were just too far gone.  The pot alone was going to need several hours of soaking to start to undo the damage I inflicted on it.

So, I left the pot in the sink, the non-crispy beans in the bowl (that we later fed to the poultry), and I just crawled back into bed.  So much for dinner.

I'll come up with something later, I thought to myself.

Pancakes, it is.