Another day into my quest to explore the world of beans and it’s turning out that planning for this is as time-consuming as making our travel plans. With 36 varieties of beans, I may as well be mapping out 36 countries we’ll be visiting. I have 18 recipes collected in a document but will likely need another 25 to 30 as there will be some more dishes with other recipes that use the same beans. I’ve found some interesting stuff but I can tell you that discovering these hidden gems is no easy feat. Google wants to deliver to the demographic of where my search originates: white old guy in the bland state of Arizona.

Have you ever searched for Chinese recipes only to get 15 suggestions on how to make that shit orange chicken from Panda Express? Well, this is just about like that. No, I don’t only want to make baked beans and navy bean soup. Nor do I want Americanized versions of recipes from other countries. So how does one search the internet when you want to break out of our borders but you don’t know what the popular bean dishes are in Cape Verde, West Africa? Well, it turns out that cachupa is seriously popular out in those islands, and in Nigeria over on the mainland, it’s ewa oloyin or Nigerian bean porridge and it sounds interesting enough to give it a try.

Can you guess where this is ultimately going? It’s crashing right into my pit of OCD. First I needed to scour websites for varieties of beans. Then I hit the map of the globe to inspire me about within which countries I want to search. Once I discover that Chileans enjoy porotos Granados I need to build a composite of what the recipe might look like in Chile as 10 of the recipes are posted by Americans and use pinto, navy, or cannellini beans when the original calls for cranberry, but getting there takes time. Then I start buying supplies like mad. Such as the nearly 20 pounds of various beans that will be arriving soon. In my shopping cart at Amazon right now I have palm oil, aji mirasol hot pepper paste from Peru, saffron, sofrito which is a paella base but will be used for something else, oloyin beans, shrimp bouillon, and ground shrimp. Regarding the ground shrimp, we already have some of this incredibly horrid smelling stuff as I use it to make Burmese salads, but I’ll need more of it for some of the African dishes I’m considering. Now I’ll have two-lifetime supplies of shrimp bouillon as what else will I use that for, and then I’ll have to scramble to figure out how to use the aji mirasol and sofrito in other dishes.

I hit buy and see that I’ll have 5 different guilt-inducing packages sent to me over the next 10 days. I can only guess that Amazon needs to ship the various items from corners of the country where a local population uses some of these ingredients, compared to Arizona that uses none of them. But it’s getting late and I need to relax and let go of exploring this red-red bean recipe from Ghana. I’m frantic now but need to go find some sleep as 4:50 will arrive no matter where I’m at on the culinary map and how late I indulge my curiosity to meet other countries via their bean dishes.

One more thing before stopping for the evening: I want a search engine where I can look for preparations of something like broccoli for example. This smart search engine will give me a list I can dig through that features the top 5 recipes from every country around the earth that uses that ingredient. Yep, that’s what I need.