Bean Salad or Bust

Our Sunday School class is the Bereavement Class for August, so we’re responsible for providing the food if someone has a death or illness in their family. We had two deaths in the first week, so it’s looking to be a busy month.

Friday I got an email asking if I could bring bean salad or coleslaw to the church at 11:30am on Saturday morning. For some unknown reason, I said I’d bring the bean salad. I don’t eat bean salad, let alone make it, so I don’t know what possessed me to volunteer for that. But I found a Paula Deen recipe and planned on picking up the ingredients Friday evening so it could chill overnight. No big deal.

Brady and I run some errands Friday evening and that’s when the trouble started. We were at Barnes and Noble. Brady was playing at the train table in the children’s department (in the very back of the store) and I was sitting there, reading the newest Rachael Ray magazine. Then I smelled it. We had to go to the car, so I told Brady we had to leave in 2 minutes (trying to give him some warning). The 2 minutes were up and then I proceeded to take the Walk of Shame. He screamed, and I do mean SCREAMED, from the very back of B&N to the very front of B&N. That was one of the longest walks ever. So I get him in the car and manage to wrestle with him long enough to get his diaper changed and then he refused to get in his car seat. I practically had to sit on him to get him strapped in. I’m sure people were taking down my license plate number to call social services.

I should have known better at this point, but I had to go by the store to get the ingredients for this bean salad. We stop at our beloved Bloom store and I get Brady in his race car shopping cart which normally keeps him occupied for a short shopping excursion. Not tonight! We barely get in the door before he starts screaming for something. Remember it was 105F on Friday evening and that made things even worse. I turn right around and take him back to the car, where again I have to fight to get him in the car seat. Two teenage girls pulled up next to us during this scene and I’m sure they decided right then and there to never have children. So I go home, with no ingredients for this bean salad.

I figure I’ll just hit the deli in the morning and pick up some bean salad, put it my own bowl, and call it a day. However, I didn’t realize that bean salad should be on the endangered species list after going to 3 grocery stores and finding no bean salad, just a well-meaning stock clerk who tried to give me 3 bean soup and didn’t understand why I was about to cry onto his apron. By this time it was 10:30am on Saturday morning, I was arguing with Lennon about why I agreed to bring bean salad in the first place, I had other groceries melting in the trunk and Brady was looking for his morning snack. I say I’ll just make the bean salad I was going to make and hopefully it would be okay at room temperature, only to discover that Brady had used to recipe as a coloring page and dropped it somewhere in Walmart. So I scour my cookbooks looking for another recipe and give Lennon the list of ingredients so he could go pick them up and I could make it just minutes before I had to leave.

He comes back, I throw together this damn bean salad and finish it at exactly 11:20am, the precise time I need to walk out the door.

The moral of the story is, if someone gives you the choice between bean salad and coleslaw, always pick the coleslaw.