feeding poison to hungry souls

[blk]

Some years ago, when I started doing a lot of bean soups, I decided to build up a collection of dried beans, so I could just always have a variety of stuff on hand. I collected pretty much everything I could find, including a lot that I'd never heard of before looking - like canary, adzuki, roman, and pigeon peas - among another dozen of the more

Comments

[eub]

Oh wow, they are lupine seeds, I had no idea people leach out the toxins! Dating back to the pharaohs, and the Incan empire...

Says they're used in Europe as a widespread flour additive, are very high in protein, nutritionally a bit like low-fat soybeans, can even make lupine-milk and lupine-tofu.

I'm pretty amazed they aren't sold with big warning labels.

[blk]

Yeah, it's yet another one of those things that I go "how did early people ever figure out this was edible?" although certainly not as extreme as some.

And no warning labels, no directions. Just dry beans in a large bin, along with a bunch of other varieties. I wonder if they (PennMac) ever gets complaints?

(I finished up eating my teeny batch this morning. Dang, they were tasty. I could possibly see myself making a large batch every once in a long while...)

[eub]

Just in a bulk bin? That *must* get people in trouble. Maybe the expectation is your Italian mama obviously showed you how to cook them. I guess maybe they're bitter enough that people reject them as awful without poisoning themselves.

People say that some (but not all) of the commercial ones are either pre-processed or a 'sweet' variety. Another way for people to get in trouble!

I'm surprised teenagers don't eat them to get fucked up; it sounds like it's an anticholinergic toxin like Jimson weed, and there's a sodium channel blocker in there. Which at least isn't as insidious as what I was thinking it was, a cumulative neurotoxin like in other toxic legumes (vetch, Lathyrus), which have damaged people who eat them traditionally.

[blk]

Also, I HAVE a nice healthy lupine plant. It has pretty flowers. I'm vaguely tempted to try collecting the seeds this year...

[gothtique]

Glad you didn't poison your self, but i can't blame you for skipping the high maintenance beans in the future. Plenty of yummy beans out there that cook up just as tasty and much easier!

:-) Ya make me want to make fagioli!

[marmal8]

Nature is amazing. "Don't eat this poisonous-ass shit, here, let me make it extra nasty-tasting!"