If you want to stock up on anything, go for beans. Not just the canned variety, but the dry beans as well.  What other food can you store for years, plant, and make either chilli or whipped cream with?  If you read all the way to the bottom I will share with you bean-magic that you may have not known about.

No, it has nothing to do with Jack and the Beanstalk; that was just a myth – this is real magic.

But before I continue, A Covid-19 update:

We are self isolating like most of our fellow human beings. The global numbers of infected people had surpassed a million and the world is at a standstill, suspended in a bizzare existence created overnight. It seems that self-isolation will be in place for several more months.  Very surreal.

We are keeping busy.  In our pyjamas of course.

Our resident daughter and her husband both work from home and Tony and I are doing our semi-work/semi-retired thing from home as usual.  The only change is that now there are 4 people working from home trying not to  step on each other toes both literally and figuratively.  So far we are very good at not getting on each others nerves!  It also means that we have to be careful not to walk in on one of their Zoom meetings looking dishevelled and clad in Christmas pyjamas.  Your bedraggled Mom is definitely not as cute as having your cat jump on your keyboard or your 2-year-old banging on your keyboard.

We are watching a lot of movies.   Our choices get weirder as we go and watching Contagion may have been the most unnecessary example, but Knives Out, Paul, and The Death Of Stalin, were good distractions.  We still throw in a sprinkle of Jackie Chan in between.  Just to be clear we are talking about the 80s and 90s Hong Kong Jackie Chan movies.  We are now working our way through the Mission Impossible movies.  Good fun.

We mostly snack on ice cream sandwiches while watching movies.  And we also drink wine and beer.  We still have a good supply of both.  We watched Oz and James’s Big Wine Adventure and tried to follow the step by step wine appreciation swirl and slurp method with the wine we were drinking at the moment.  It really helped define the wine’s true quality. I think that Tony was able to describe it the best when he said: “I am getting notes of cardboard”

Yes, we did buy the 4 litre wine boxes.  Don’t judge.

We need to be more active

One of the things we thought we would try was Tai Chi and we think we like it.  Now we just need to try and keep it up.

We did some garden work and removed the fallen branches of a cedar tree.

Started some seeds just in case we will need to fend for ourselves and grow our food when the world will finally collapse.  There is also the option of losing all of our money and not be able to afford to buy fresh vegetables.  The last reason for having a vegetable garden is that we can’t travel so we can actually look after a garden.

We should be going for walks in the forest, but we are not doing that. We should also be catching up on some creative project that we had on hold, but we are not very inspired.  Even writing is hard and posts from our past trip are on hold for now.  It may help if you let us know that you would like some travel posts again.

We thought we’ll be reading a lot more, but we are not.

Instead, for a bit of fun and time travel, we hooked up an old Apple computer so that we could play some of the old games.  For example, Harry the Handsome Executive was a big hit in this house at one point.  This computer is about 25 years old and still working well!

I was glad that Tony went through Abuse quickly since I didn’t appreciate the blood curdling screams and howls coming out of the basement.

As for me, I did go down the rabbit hole doing my son-in-law’s family tree.  I emerged a few days later with each and every branch of his tree reaching back to 14-15th centuries with a handful of royalty in several countries, as well as the founding fathers of several communities in the U.S and in Canada.  I’ve never seen anything like it!

Tony on the other hand, finished building the new bathroom in the basement and is now making tables. 

I think he is working through his fourth table now.

Now we just need to get legs for all of the tables.

Should we label this line of products the Corona line, or is that morbidly cruel?

We are planning a multi holiday for next week.  Easter/Passover/Halloween/Christmas encompassed into one glorious holiday.  Should be fun.

Or perhaps we are starting to lose it…

The weather is warmer so we tried to revive the sick battery in the van.  We weren’t successful so our next course of action will be to change the wiring in the van.  The manufactures, KS2, gave us some directions to work with and we’ll dive under the van and try to switch the wiring to the correct configuration.  We will probably need to replace the Battery as well, but that will have to wait.

But back to beans

This post ended up being more of a Covid-19 update than about beans, so here is the beans part with some magic to follow.

Bean dishes are always great but now more than ever we appreciate them.  Chickpeas, for example are great as a snack, a side dish, a salad, or a main meal.  I can probably write a post just about chickpeas and share some recipes with you. Generally, legumes work well in mediterranean and Mexican cuisine which we all love so having beans in our pantry now is a blessing.

We love using the InstaPot for dry beans since we can eliminate the overnight soaking.

But we can also grow beans using dry beans from our pantry. Some dry beans may be treated and may not sprout so you have to experiment with them.  I did try one and it sprouted after 3 days, so just try it out.

If you like bean sprouts, do your homework as not all bean sprouts are safe to eat and some dry beans are toxic when dry, so again, do your homework before venturing into new culinary adventures.

Beans for Eggs- the magic

And now for the bean-magic part.

Did you run out of eggs?  Are you a vegan, or as in our case, allergic to eggs?

You probably know that you can use the liquid from bean cans as a base for soup, but did you know that the beans cooking water can substitute eggs?  This liquid, called aquafaba, can be added as a binder instead of eggs.  It can also be whipped into a beautiful whipped cream and once sugar is added you will not be able to tell the difference between it and its eggy counterpart!

We followed this cake recipe to whip the aquafaba, but there are many other ones online.

The aquafaba needs to be the right consistency  to be effective, which is the same consistency of the liquid in canned beans.  If you are cooking dry beans you will need to cook down the liquid to the right consistency.

Three tablespoons of aquafaba will replace 1 egg and 2 tablespoons will replace one egg white.  So a can of beans can be equivalent to about 6 eggs.

You can also use powdered aquafaba.  It’s available online and can be used instead of the liquid (and of course, instead of eggs).

We made delicious pancakes with aquafaba.

Next, we’ll try making vegan mayo.

So don’t throw out your aquafaba.  Especially now that we are trying to make our food last longer.  Actually, one of the best things about using aquafaba is that you end up with leftover beans.  Next time you use aquafaba don’t throw out your beans – make homemade hummus or chilli instead.

We now need to figure out how to make ice cream sandwiches from aquafaba for our movie binge-watching and we’ll be just fine for a few months.

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