Thursday evening – The Bean Supremacy

Given the bumper length of the previous update, this evening’s one will be a bit a shorter. Which to be honest is just as well, since I don’t have quite so much to write about today’s meals.

For a start, the discussion on breakfast will be rather short, because by the time I’d visited the supermarket and evaluated my cravings it was essentially lunchtime, so I ended up skipping my morning porridge. Naturally I was devastated by this turn of events as I have grown to love porridge in the same way as a man eventually learns to love being punched repeatedly in the face.

Lunch consisted of a reheated version of yesterday’s bake. I guess I can supply a recipe for that.

Reheated bake

I'm using the same picture as yesterday because it's the same meal as yesterday. It fills me with great joy that my most used picture on this blog is also the blurriest. If it makes you feel any better, pretend this was taken midway through the fence climbing scene from Taken 3. (Warning: video not recommended for people who get motion sickness or who are allergic to fences).

Ingredients: cold bake, time

1.       Take the cold bake.

2.       Heat it up

Turns out it’s not that complicated a recipe.

For dinner, I decided to go extravagantly all out, partly because it’s Thursday (and if you can’t have an extravagant celebration on a Thursday, when can you have it?), and mostly because I can. The excitement here stemmed from eating three different types of bean in a single meal! Can you handle the excitement? Because I’m struggling.

The three, in no particular order, were:

·         Chickpeas. If beans were football players, this would be the star striker. He plays a pretty central role, he gets a lot of play time and he gets results.

·         Red kidney beans. This bean would probably be on the substitutes bench, because it’s still pretty good but I only remembered it was there because all the other beans had gone.

·         Cannellini beans. This would be Giorgio Chiellini because I only vaguely remembered he existed, he is probably Italian and I don’t really usually make much use of him in day-to-day life.

This also was accompanied by rice. If beans were footballers, the rice would be Benedict Cumberbatch, because Benedict Cumberbatch is not a footballer.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of any of my meals today, so here is a picture of a plate that almost certainly contained some food at some point.

You will also notice in the background a growing collection of empty tins of beans, which are starting to form a gang in my kitchen. There’s also a much-neglected toastie maker to the right, which is probably wondering what it’s done to deserve such abandonment.

I apologise for how short this evening post is – hopefully I made up for it in the morning with an especially long one. Tomorrow is the final day, and along with the usual combination of helpful recipes and general whinging, I’ll be giving some reflections on my experience throughout the week. Depending on how much I come up with and how jarring a transition that is from the rest of the content, this may form a separate “serious” post, which hopefully will still prove to be interesting.

 Note: As part of my Mean Bean challenge I will be writing about my experiences each day – the more money raised, the more I write. At the time of writing, people have generously donated £365, which means I’m aiming at 2,025 words per day (excluding the ones in this explanatory paragraph). This will hopefully come in two posts, one in the morning and one in the evening. If you would like these posts to get even longer, and support the excellent work of Tearfund at the same time, please click here.