Tepary Beans

When I was researching for my blog post on the Tohono O'odham people, one of the foods they relied on was the ‘white tepary bean’. With my New Year’s Resolutions in mind (#3. Eat more wisely), I thought I would research these beans to see how they compare to the more traditional beans I grew up eating. Not because I plan to add these to my diet (although I could... at least one of my sources will gladly sell me a pound or more, complete with cooking instructions), but because if I’m going to think of food between meals, I should probably make it healthy types of food and not left-over Christmas candy. Or any kind of candy.

The information on the O’odham people specified white tepary beans, but there are many varieties of tepary beans. One source even listed several wild varieties, which they will sell me a packet of 50 to grow in my own garden. Alas, Florida is not the same climate as the Sonora Desert, so I don’t think they would grow here very well. Especially with me being the unskilled gardener than I am.

Tepary beans - including the white varieties - are native to the Sonoran Desert. They were first domesticated in Northwest Mexico some 4,000 years ago. The ‘secrets’ of growing and using them were passed down from generation to generation, particularly among the O’odham people. Being a desert plant, they are tolerant of heat, drought and alkaline soil. In the last 30 years, tepary beans have spread to other arid regions worldwide.

Beans are already super foods, but tepary beans are even higher in protein (21 grams in 1/2 cup!) and fiber. Their fiber helps control cholesterol and diabetes. These small beans have a meaty, dense texture and are savory in taste. White versions are slightly sweet, while the browner versions have a more earthy taste. And even with all this fiber, tepary beans produce less gassiness than other beans like navy, pinto or kidney beans.

During the 1920’s, Tohono O’odham farmers grew 1.5 million pounds of tepary beans per year. However, during the 1930’s, increased mechanization and irrigation led to less tepary beans being grown, and by the 1950’s, teparay beans were extremely rare.

Native Seeds/SEARCH began to promote the use of tepary seeds in the 1970’s and 80’s, and today they conserve nearly 100 versions of domesticated and wild tepary beans, adapted to low and high desert environments.

Their website had pictures of different varieties, so I compared the ‘domesticated’ to the ‘wild’ types. The domesticated beans seemed very much like navy or pinto beans in shape, and each bean looked pretty much the same as all the others of that type. But the wild varieties were much more angular and looked more like pebbles, all the same color. I imagine the angular edges are from more seeds being crowded into one pod, and they squish each other trying to get as big as they can.

We can call Florida many things, but ‘desert’ is not one of them. Maybe I could try to grow them in pots in the house, but they like temperatures as high or higher than 100°F, and we have the air conditioning on long before the house gets that hot. I am NOT heat tolerant, and if the house ever got to temperatures teparies like, I would not just wilt, I would try to melt.

Guess I’ll just have to order a pound and see what they’re like.

https://www.ranchogordo.com/products/white-tepary

http://store.ramonafarms.com/White-Tepary-Beans-STOTOAH-BAVI/productinfo/BTEPWH1/

https://www.nativeseeds.org/collections/tepary-beans

https://www.nativeseeds.org/pages/tohono-oodham-white-tepary-bean

Ancient Crime

Archaeologists have discovered that crime - particularly fraud and counterfeiting - are not new types of human activity. They can now prove that these underhanded dealings have been happening for millennium.

The evidence comes from 2 archeological sites in Spain; La Molina cave and the Cova del Gegant cave. At La Molina, 10 people were buried with goods that included pottery, bone awls, objects carved from ivory and amber beads. This site dates back to the 3rd millennium BC.

At the Cova del Gegant, an estimated 19 people were buried, dating from the 2nd millennium BC. These people were accompanied by pottery and ornamental beads made of lignite, coral, amber, shell and gold.

The amber beads tricked many archaeologists, but tests revealed that not all of them were real amber. Some of the ‘amber’ beads found at Cova del Gegant were found to be pieces of mollusk shell core coated with pine resin, and these were mixed in with real amber beads. The fake amber beads from La Molina were seeds coated with resin. Apparently this type of surface coating effectively emulated the translucence, shine and color of amber. In fact, similar methods of imitating turquoise in the Levant have been identified from the 6th millennium BC.

People started to trade commodities thousands of years ago in Europe. Amber was highly valuable and was used by leaders to cultivate an image of power and wealth. Some amber was brought to Spain from the Baltic Sea, but another trade route was through Sicily, which also supplied ivory, Alpine jade and cinnabar.

So why create fake amber beads? Perhaps there wasn’t enough real amber to fill the demand for it. Perhaps the traders - or their suppliers - saw a way to make ‘a fast buck’. And although the exotic goods buried with these people showed that they could afford the real thing, perhaps their survivors saw no reason to waste all the real, expensive stuff by burying it forever.

I heard it said once that ‘counterfeiting’ was the oldest profession, save one. At the time, I thought that was an overstatement. Maybe I was wrong.

https://www.newsweek.com/5000-year-old-fake-amber-beads-found-spanish-burial-sites-first-example-1406723

Closing 2019

As 2019 draws to a close, I’ve been looking back over my daily journals to see what I’ve been doing. Let me explain that a little. I have my daily ‘To Do’ list, where I list all the things I’d like to work on that day. And things I don’t really want to do, but need to, like take my pills and brush my teeth. Fact is, if it isn’t on my list, I probably won’t remember to do it.

At the end of the day, I transfer everything I’ve crossed off to my journal and add some comments. Depending on my mood, those comments might be brief (‘I got some stuff done today’), or they could be long and rambling, touching on all sorts of things that happened during the day and how I feel about them. It’s just a method of proving to myself what I’ve done, a way of reflecting on what I’ve accomplished and how I feel about things.

In looking back over the past couple weeks, I’ve noticed that I’ve been writing, writing, re-writing, editing and writing. Oh, yes, and writing.

What does that mean? I’ve been working on a lot of different writing projects. I write 2 blogs and try to post those weekly. Now, that usually means research for one of them, writing and re-writing for both of them, before I can post them. About an hour a day for each blog serves the purpose for that. Maybe a little less.

I’m also trying to write some shorts in order to produce an anthology of Atlan shorts in 2020. I keep running into walls where I’m not sure exactly how the next section of the scene goes, but I give myself an hour a day to work on that. Sometimes that only produces 500 words, others I’ll get 1000 words done. I haven’t gotten to the re-writing stage on that, because I have 3 or 4 more shorts to rough draft to get the number of words I need for a book.

I’m editing John’s next book for a spring release. This is a 2nd edit, so it goes faster, since I’m mostly looking for grammar and punctuation. Hopefully, I found all the places that didn’t quite make sense in the first edit, and John fixed them. On the other hand, I’ve read this book before (during the first edit), and I tend now to start losing my focus after a time, so I only work on it an hour a day.

I’m also writing a novel (a romance). This is a straight rough draft at this point, and I usually give it an hour a day, more or less. If I don’t feel like working on that one, I have 2 other novels (a near-future sf and a paranormal detective) that I can move over and work on for a day or two.

That’s a lot of writing projects. Could I get more done if I concentrated on one? I don’t know. I seem to be able to focus for an hour or slightly more at a time, and then I’m ready to move on to the next project. By splitting up my day in such small chunks, it looks like I’ve accomplished a lot, because I can say I’ve worked on a bunch of projects. And I have ‘naturally occurring’ breaks when I can get up and do other things, like let the dog out or throw supper in the crock pot or even go outside and work on the yard. Except for letting the dog out, those things are on my to do list and can be crossed off.

I don’t know if any other writers work on so many projects at the same time. Yes, it takes time to get anything ‘done’ done. It will be a month or three before I get the romance rough draft done. It could be another week before I get this short rough draft done and can start on the next. But in a year or two, I hope to be churning out books regularly.

Wish me luck! And perseverance.