Good Morning Doctor! - Chapter 2 Beans

I put the beans to soak as Mother suggested. Next morning early, before the little folks got up, I tiptoed down to start breakfast. I was half way across the kitchen when I was jerked back in amazement, my eyes bulging at the sight before me.

The Beans!

I had forgotten they would swell. They were all over the place! The kettle, no match for its heaving contents, was almost hidden in a rounding mound of them; the knife drawer of the table had been left open and it, too, was full. On the floor around the table were little piles of the beans that had "dripped" off. Why, I had soaked enough for threshers!

Full of shame at my own ignorance and almost overcome with a desire to scoop up the mess and throw the whole thing out to the chickens, I finally pulled myself together and began scooping up beans. I used the dripping pan, the bread pans, the kettles! Before I was done I had every pan in the house full of beans? For that noon, and several meals after, the Rohlfs had more than plenty to eat although there was a certain monotony to the diet.

If the beans were bad, the eggs were worse.

It was some weeks after we had finished the beans that I, for lack of a better idea, decided on eggs for dinner. I had often seen Mother cook them, breaking each one into a saucer to test its freshness and then slipping it from the saucer into the skillet. To my boyish mind that method had merit but seemed much too slow. I got a big platter and broke to dozen eggs onto it; a labor-saving idea, I figured.

Then carefully I took the brimming platterful over to the stove and poised it above the hot frying pan, ready to slide the eggs in slowly. I tilted the platter ever so little when plot! The whole mess dumped itself! The skillet wasn't big enough. Down its sides and onto the stove ran the eggs, changing as they ran from yolks and whites to stinking char. I grabbed the goose wing from behind the stove and frantically scraped at the smoking stuff; but before I could get it off, the whole house smelled of that bitter odor which simply wrapped itself around everything!

 For days the ghosts of those burned eggs seemed to haunt me; I couldn't open a cupboard door without that whiff of charred eggs fairly wrinkling the inside of my nose.