Great Northern Beans & Literature

So, I soaked a bunch of Great Northern Beans for a pot of White Chicken Chili and discovered that I had soaked too many. There I am, cruising the internet for more Great Northern Beans recipes when I run across a comment on a Farmgirl Fare that mentions the late Laurie Coleman. Laurie Coleman of Happy All the Time?

Nowadays it's clear that I am a mush-for-brains middle-aged girl, so these sorts of introspective inquiries are more quickly resolved.

Yes indeed. Somehow I had missed both that she wrote cookbooks and that she had died. So there I go, off to google all that, and I run across this incredibly cool literature map. You can type in the name of an author that you fancy and get a visual on what other authors might also appeal to you. Very very nifty and puts me in mind of the mattering map in Rebecca Goldstien's The Mind-Body Problem, a book I loved when I was a college girl when I, along with the heroine of the novel, struggled to decide if I was pretty (for a smart girl), or smart (for a pretty girl) and if either merit was sufficient in and of itself. It was a big burning question for me back then. Nowadays it's clear that I am a mush-for-brains middle-aged girl, so these sorts of introspective inquiries are more quickly resolved. Anyway, it was a great read. Where was I going with this?

Oh yes, beans. I went out in search of thrifty bean recipes and came back with a literature map which I am going to use to find my next favorite author. I need some new reads.

The Laurie Colwin cookbooks? They are on my Amazon wishlist.

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