It looks like there are two people who are on board with my bean week challenge. There is no cool button to post, but if someone who is artistic wants to come up with one, I'd be thrilled, especially since I would like to do this one week a month, just to see how many different ways I can do it. I'll post it right at the top of this page. If we have multiples, I'll post all of them. Just remember to save any images to your own computer instead of linking them from this post.

For those of you who are interested in trying it out each month as well, I will post about it coming up in the previous week's menu plan. Just to make it easier, I will make it the fourth full week of each month, barring any major holidays interfering with it (like Thanksgiving next month and Christmas in December), in those months, I'll do it the third week, which can also help you spend less and do less in the kitchen so you'll have extra time and money to prepare for the holiday.

Here are my few guidelines:

• 1. Beans or legumes must feature as a major component of each dinner meal during the week of the challenge.


• 2. Please share how you are making the most of each of your ingredients or dishes.


• 3. Although I initially talked about a beans and rice week, you do not have to use rice all week, or even at all if you use other things to go with your beans.


• 4. Please share which method (tier?) you are using for the challenge (details below).


• 5. If you are linking to Mr. Linky, you must make the link go directly to your blog post, not just the general URL of your blog. (If you don't blog, just leave your menu and ideas in the comments).


• 6. Somewhere in your post, link back to this post: http://arabianknits.blogspot.com/2009/10/bean-week-challenge.html

Okay, so that was several guidelines, not a few, but I hope they aren't too stringent.

In addition, I'd like to read about your family's and your reactions and experiences, so if you could edit your post to reflect that, or leave a comment here with a link to a different post, I'd appreciate it.

There are many ways to do this. I don't want to limit how people do this, so I will give three different ways to approach it. Just mention which approach you are taking somewhere in the post or comment. This isn't rigid, I'm breaking with one of these, right off the bat, I'm just looking for a general approach.

1. Cook a huge pot of beans and take from it and/or add to it for your meals throughout the week.

2. Use the same kind of beans each day of the week, cooking different batches as you go.

3. Cook and use different beans each day as you wish to use them.

I hope others will try this. Mr. Linky will be up by 8:00 pm Pacific time on Sunday. I think it is a great way to maximize the food budget as well as to look at how other people have to live. We are doing this by choice, but there are many people who eat this way out of necessity. I have been known to tell my children that we are fortunate to have the luxury of getting bored with certain foods or avoiding those we dislike. Most people in the world have to eat whatever is available or go without. I'd like to approach this experiment with that in mind.

Labels: Frugality, Homemaking, Tales from the Kitchen