Odd smell.

Whenever I cook black beans for black beans and rice, I do a quick soak on the dried beans and boil them intensely in salted water for like 30 minutes, and then I let them sit for a few hours before I start cooking them in earnest.

I saw this recommendation years ago online and I’ve been doing it for a while because it works -- if you don't, the beans cook weird and hard -- but lately I’ve noticed that whenever I come back to my apartment when they’ve been intensely boiled and are still sitting, the entire apartment smells like burnt plastic, somehow, like that’s the smell from the beans, as like this subtle addition onto their normal smell.

Like, it just hits you, but if you pause and stop and mentally process the smell, it starts registering just as the normal bean smell, but only after you’ve put some thought into it.

Just very strange.