About a year ago when I decided that we needed to live a more sustainable life I took a serious look at beans. Bean are a wonderful food. They are full of nutrients, and combined with rice are a complete protein. They store really, really well and best of all they are cheap!

There was one catch…

Ok,

well,

two catches….

First, I didn’t know how to cook beans. I had, up to that point, only used canned beans from the store, on the rare occasions that I used beans.

Second, I didn’t think we would really like them.

So I came to two decisions: #1 I needed to learn how to cook beans, my pioneer mothers knew how and I needed to relearn this skill. #2 I needed to learn to like beans, I needed to try recipes and serve them to my family often enough that they go use to them and eventually like them.

So for about a year now I have been searching and cooking and learning all about beans. We have had our share of crunchy beans for dinner (bleck), my family has been wonderful patient with me (at least Dadzoo has, he is really good at tolerating, with a smile, my mess ups).

I thought I would share what I have learned with everybody. In times of plenty and times of famine knowing how to cook from scratch is an invaluable skill. I can have 1,000 pounds of kidney beans in my basement, but they are worthless to me if I don’t know how to prepare them and serve them. Also, I believe, that a time of crisis is not the time to be learning these skills, we should prepare ourselves, not only in the storing of food but the skills to use them the best way possible. Our families need to be use to eating these foods, a time of famine or emergency is not the time to be teaching a 10 year old to love beans! I have a series of posts I am going to be doing in the coming weeks, with some recipes and some tips I have learned along the way.

First of all I would like to show you all how I cook beans. I do a large batch and freeze the beans for later use. This is really convenient and easy, especially if I am running behind, it takes about 5 minutes to grab a bag of beans and defrost it in some warm water.

I start out with 6 cups beans. I am not picky on what type, (I have used Great Northern, Kidney and Black, in various combinations) Today I picked Great Northern and Kidney. I measured the beans and put it in my crock pot.

I fill the crock pot up to the very tip-top with water (about 12-14 cups)

I add salt, pepper and any other spice, a tiny bit of hot pepper is yummy too. (just a note, I have heard that salt and onions make the beans cook slower, when I do the crock pot method I don’t worry about that, we will be cooking these babies for about 10 hours so it doesn’t really matter.)

A handful of dried onions, fresh work too.

Two cloves of garlic, I just peel and cut them in half (I don’t mince garlic, ever) they cook down into nothing anyway.

Give it all a quick stir

Cover and cook on low over night or up to 12 hours.

This is what it looks like the next morning, all cooked with almost no water left. The beans are perfectly soft without being mushy.

I dump it all into a big colander and rinse it really well (that will help keep the gas down)

I measure 4 cups and put it into Ziploc bags and freeze. It makes about 16 cups of cooked beans.