I mentioned a three bean/baked bean recipe last Friday**, and can now report that I tried a version of it, using canned butter beans and navy beans as the second and third beans. I like the spices that I actually used, to wit, bacon, dry mustard, BBQ sauce (the recipe uses ketchup), brown sugar, cider vinegar (the recipe uses wine vinegar), and an onion (mine was sweet and I sauteed it in the bacon grease). I used canned beans and got the wrong size of actual — baked beans in a can — but it didn’t seem to matter, except for making less than I thought the recipe would. That’s okay. There aren’t too many people eating in my household. If I try the recipe again, and I probably will, I will not use very large canned butter beans. There’s nothing wrong with the taste. I just don’t like the aesthetics.

I also mentioned Boston Brown bread. I haven’t tried it yet because it calls for rye flour which I don’t have, and it wants me to use washed out cans to steam the dough on top of the stove for three hours, which I am not going to do. I’ve been reading about what other people use, besides buying $38 steamed pudding receptacles from Amazon, which seems ridiculous. Some people make the recipe, and just use a plain bread pan with aluminum foil on top, which they put in the oven. They report delicious taste, but it seems like cheating. They do not report authentic brown bread taste. Also, the raisin question was raised.

One work-around for cooking the bread is to use glass canning jars in a crockpot, with the aforementioned aluminum foil to cover them. This option raises an internet storm because some people cook bread, or muffins, or such-like, in canning jars, in the oven, attach a lid, and stick the result in their pantries, as though they had canned bread. They claim to have eaten it safely, even six months later. Maybe so.

Several factions have lengthy comments about said operation. I paid attention when the canning jar people stated that their glass is not meant for dry oven heat. Frankly, that’s good enough for me. But the crock pot option is not dry heat. There’s supposed to be simmering water half way up the jars for the whole time they are in the crock pot, and when I’m done, I’m not going to leave the bread in the jars. I don’t like storing things in glass in general because I tend to drop stuff, and glass makes a mess in the food when I drop it. Plus, then the bread is inedible. Occasionally I store things in Pyrex, but if I froze this bread it would be in plastic. (I had to clean up a quart of chocolate sauce mixed with glass splinters the other day, when I broke my don’t-store-in-glass rule.)

I will still have to buy rye flour before I play this game. Plus, I’ve been reading about sourdough and trying to figure out if I can use it. My arthritis really doesn’t like regular white flour, even though I’m careful to get unbleached.

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My current novel is in a peculiar stage. I started with a weepy heroine and wrote a lot of setting. Then I discovered that I was writing a story about institutional troubles, and my heroine was a drip. When I fixed her drippiness, she wasn’t really connected to the story the way I had imagined. However, she was definitely the cause of certain events, even if it was sort of backwards. Some piece of writing advice (which I can’t find right this minute) said that the protagonist is the one that drives the action. So she definitely gets the top billing, and I have to work around this peculiarity.

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A few weeks ago I went to a gym, the kind with weights and machines, for the first time in my life. I thought if I was going to do this, it made sense to get someone to explain the machines to me. The front desk said that nobody did that; I’d have to pay a personal trainer for a while. Well! In service of a desperate desire to figure out whether I absolutely have to have a hip replacement, or whether I can stave it off with exercise, I paid for a trainer to explain things. She will finish with me later this week.

Meantime, yesterday I went to the gym without her for the first time. Just — leaving this out there. Not sure how I feel.

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Yesterday was also the Feast of Saint Simon and Saint Jude, who are patrons for someone I love. Here’s a link for all the saints from October 24 to October 31. https://media.benedictine.edu/saints-feast-days-october-24-30

**https://www.bushbeans.com/en_US/bean-recipes/baked-beans-casserole-with-bacon