To Bean, or Not to Bean
(There is no question.)
Let’s get something straight: if you told me a few years ago that I would be spending my 50s acting like a groupie for a legume, I would have told you that you were, well, full of beans. But life is full of plot twists, and mine arrived on a random evening while watching an episode of From the Source.
The show featured Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo, a man talking about heirloom beans with the kind of reverence usually reserved for fine wine or rare art. Intrigued—and maybe a little skeptical—I ordered a bag. When they arrived and I finally cooked them, it completely blew my mind.
It was a total culinary awakening. It tasted like I had never actually eaten a bean before in my entire life. Turns out, those generic, chalky grocery store canned beans I’d been eating for decades were just a pale imitation of the real thing. It is a profoundly weird, beautiful experience to hit your 50s and suddenly discover an entirely new category of food.
For a while, my poor husband bore the brunt of my new passion. I was a walking encyclopedia of legume trivia. One evening, after I had spent twenty minutes incessantly boring him with hyper-specific facts about beans, he looked up and asked: "Why don't you just start a bean blog already?"
It was a fair point. Around that same time, several friends started asking me bean-cooking questions, and I found myself repeating the same advice over and over. Between my husband's desperate plea for silence and my friends' need for legume lore, this site was born.
I am a full-blown bean brain now.
I am out here living my absolute best midlife, leaning in incredibly hard to what some might call a "grandma hobby," and I have zero regrets. Some of my friends quilt, others do needlepoint - as for me, I am apparently harboring an intense, borderline-spiritual devotion to heirloom legumes.
Consider this blog your official invitation to join my obsession. I'm spilling the beans on everything I know, everything I buy, and everything I burn - I mean cook, so pull up a chair, grab a spoon, and let’s get cooking!
About the Bean Brain
a.k.a. Emily Adams
By day, I officially serve as the Coordinator of Communications and Media for Grace Presbytery. I'm also on a personal spiritual journey to visit four different online churches every week and explore ways to strengthen virtual fellowship. By night, I have unintentionally become a fierce defender of the culinary magic of heirloom beans.
You could say my career has really sprouted over the years... Before my current role, I spent 14 years as a freelance branding entrepreneur for small businesses, artists, non-profits, and churches. And before that, I was an educator and product designer in the paper crafts industry - teaching innovative crafting techniques on the DIY Network and around the world. Basically, I’ve spent decades helping people, artists, and ministries share their unique stories and express themselves.
At my core, I'm an optimistic person who loves my family and friends. My husband, Matt, and I have been married since 1999, and we live with our tiny boss/ridiculous dog, Rambo. We don't have kids of our own, but we joyfully reign as "Aunt Emily and Uncle Matt" to a vibrant village of over 60 nieces, nephews, great nieces and nephews, and bonus nieces and nephews. I’m here to swap resources, share recipes, and spill the beans...
There is a specific kind of magic in finding a topic that turns 'just looking something up' at 9:00 PM into a masterclass of obscure knowledge by 2:00 AM.
