Here's your grocery list:

• A big jar of soup beans. Make sure the jar says "fully cooked." Get the pale, gray beans, not the red ones
• A box of cornbread mix
• Milk
• Eggs
• Two cans of Hormel chunk ham
• Crisco shortening
• Jelly

Supplies:

• A big pot
• An oven pan, square, a couple inches deep and about 10 inches per side
• A mixing bowl
• A big spoon to stir the beans
• Can opener
• Oven mitt (or a really big aloe plant)
• Bowl, plate, fork, spoon, knife
• Plastic wrap or aluminum foil

Empty the big jar of beans into the pot and put it on medium heat. Then fill the jar up with water and dump that much water into the pot. Open the cans of meat and dice the meat into small chunks and put them in the bean pot.

Making the cornbread is pretty easy. Make sure to use a big enough bowl. Dump in the yellow corn flour, add eggs and milk as recommended on the package and stir it until it's an even consistency. It will be a little lumpy, but don't worry about that. Just make sure you don't have any major clumps of corn flour.

Next you need to cover the inside of the oven pan with a smear of Crisco. There are many ways to do this, but I usually just reach into the Crisco container, dab a bit out on the ends of my fingers and work it around the pan. Pour in the batter and set it in the oven at the directed temperature.

There's a lot of folklore about knowing when the cornbread is done. Some people stick things in the mix and see if it comes out wet. Others take a bit of the cornbread and throw it at the wall to see if it sticks. My rule of thumb is to wait until you really smell the cornbread a-cookin', then wait two minutes and take it out. Of course, you could just read the package, but were's the fun in that?

Oh, don't forget to stir the beans with the big spoon once in a while. The beans and canned meat were already pretty well cooked back at the big food factory, so you're just keeping them hot until the cornbread is done.

When the cornbread is done, cut out a couple pieces, fill up your bowl with the beans and ham, and you've got a meal fit for a soup kitchen. Put jelly on one of the cornbread pieces. It's fun trying to jelly a crumbly cornbread cube. Also, break up some of the cornbread into the beans.

Suggested beverage: beer.

This is another big pot-o-food to keep in your refrigerator. Cover the pot with the pot lid or with the plastic or aluminum. Be sure to cover the cornbread too. Leftovers can be served directly from the cold refrigerated pot into your bowl and then microwaved along with the cornbread.

I had this quite a lot as a kid -- without the beer -- but I used to put so much cornbread that the soup turned to kind of a bean, spackle paste. Then I put in a bunch of ketchup to make it red and, I don't know, like soup candy I guess. (But then, I used to like lime Kool-aid mixed with milk. >:^P)

Chow.