Kitchen Disaster #26...hundred

Just a quick note here to tell you that pinto bean juice is nasty and it stains beautiful new Benjamin Moore mayonnaise paint on the front of your drawers. Kitchen drawers, not the kind that you wear. Since I worked on Monday at the hospital, by Monday night I was feeling all Becky Home-Ecky and decided to put up beans since we go through them so quickly. We love 'em and unless I think ahead (which I don't usually), I can't get them started early enough, so we crunch through our humble meal of beans and rice. I started out by soaking a huge bunch of them on Monday night, since my Ball Home Food Preservation Guide instructs me to do so, after which it states to boil them for a half hour. I was feeling pretty good on Tuesday morning around 8:00, thinking about all the work I was going to get done. I turned on the burners underneath two huge pots of beans, thinking, hmm those are a little full and will probably boil over so I'd better watch them. La dee dah, let me go attend to Owen in his room. Ooh his floor is gross. Jason must have worn his work boots in here, because this grit could grow something. Let me be industrious and vacuum. I will now think huswifery thoughts and decide which load of laundry to start. Since I now have the vacuum out, let me be efficient and vacuum the other bedrooms. *SNIFF* What is that I smell? Run to the kitchen and see the water running down the drawer fronts below my cooktop and forming a river across the floor. ACKK!!

At this point, I just laughed and got a bucket of water. Once I had wiped it all up, I decided to check INSIDE the drawers, and sure enough, the contents of the drawers had caught it. Every pot that was not already employed soaking beans was now wet with bean dew. My neatly folded towels were damp, the plastic wrap box was soggy. My stack of 10 miniature bread loaf pans had provided a cool little cascade for the bean juice river. And the fronts of the drawers were stained yellow by the hot bean liquid!

A few good things came out of this--19 quarts of beans canned, for one. For another, my cookware is all shiny again, since I recently found the miracle of Barkeeper's Friend, and when I saw all my sadly waterstained pots and pans waiting for their homes to be dried out, I went on a scouring field trip. Best of all, I relearned that my husband can be very compassionate, since all he did was laugh and say he'd touch up the paint.