Utilization of the hand-made 'pitchfork' that a friend made a half century ago in Richard Mafong's metalsmithing class at Georgia State University...............

 After yesterday's largesse, and having watched a documentary on the paucity of Native, Indigenous foods and restaurants that serve these, I was motivated, this morning, to soak various 'old' beans, with dried chopped dates, powdered with oat flour; dried bay (laurel) leaves; fresh sliced garlic; Great Salt Lake 'salt'; and rosemary...grown in a planter on my deck, crushed to extract its oils...in my mortar and pestle......Step one of my experiment in imagining what would have been eaten, in America, 500 years ago.......hmm.....the Mohicans and Choctaws may not have had ANY dates, garlic or rosemary.......does it matter? This is a conceptual Art Cooking Project, after all....not a 'real' academic examination of Culinary History, after all......my hands reek of fresh garlic and rosemary...which I absolutely loooove.....so, I'm not washing my hands until the aroma subsides or 'goes south'.....