Guess What I Just Realized?!?

If you go on Google and type in "kidney beans smell" without the quotes around it, my blog is the 3rd entry to come up!

I'm not sure if I should be excited, or really, really sad about that being the search that's driving people to my blog.

But if you're some poor soul who found my page by accident because your kitchen now smells funky, welcome!  Go open a couple of windows and then check things out here.

Also, as my public service announcement of the week:  If you're going to be cooking kidney beans this holiday season and using dried kidney beans out of a bag, make sure you boil them well before eating or throwing them in your slow cooker, because otherwise you'll end up with food poisoning.  This is probably really only an issue for my fellow slow cooker fanatics, because apparently slow cookers do not always get the beans hot enough to kill the evil toxin inside the beans.  Simmering them for 8 hours is not enough - they have to actually be boiled for a good 10 minutes.  (If you're cooking them on the stove, presumably you'll be boiling them long enough trying to soften them that whatever toxin is there will be killed.)  You don't even need to eat a lot of them to get sick - just 3 beans is enough to do it.  Scary, huh?  Personally, I think there should be more warning about this sort of thing - I mean, everyone knows that eating undercooked meat can cause problems, but I never heard anything about kidney beans until I started looking up recipes online.  Even then, a lot of recipes assume you're using canned beans, and don't warn you about the dried ones.

Alternatively, you could take the general stench and toxins as a sign that kidney beans are evil and to be avoided like the plague.

Anyway, my point is, if you're using dried beans in a recipe, do a quick search online to make sure you are cooking them correctly.  You don't want to end up fighting 15 people for bathroom rights because your chili recipe just poisoned them at your cousin's Christmas party.