Home Cooking Beans: Worth the Wait

Cooking beans always entails planning ahead of time. Unless you own a pressure cooker. But you know what? I hate pressure cookers. In fact I'm afraid of them. So I don't own one, I never did and I never will. A friend of mine lent me hers once to use it for a few days and try to get over my fear of them, but that didn't work out. I was so afraid of it that I had to get my husband to open it for me. So I gave it back to her after using it only once and said to her "just take that thing away from me!"

So how do I cook my beans? Well, like I suggested at the beginning, you need patience, and you need to plan ahead of time if you are going to cook your beans the conventional way.

Me? I don't pre-soak my beans at all. This is what I do: I get a pound of either kidney beans or pinto beans, throw them in a pot, cover them with water, toss in about a tablespoon of sea salt, a few leaves of fresh sage, and put them on the stove. I then proceed to turn on the stove to the highest. Once the water comes to a boil I lower the heat to about medium low and just let the beans simmer for anywhere from 2 to 3 hours. The results: perfectly and evenly cooked beans. No hard centers nor mashed up ones. You get one pot of delicious and nutritious beans. If I'm not going to use the beans right away I just divide them into smaller portions, place in plastic containers and off they go into the freezer.

By the way, I never buy canned beans as they just don't taste the same as home-cooked ones, and besides canned beans contain sucrose and other added flavor enhancers.

Besides the well-known nutritional valued of beans, here are my top 2 reasons why I eat beans (these are my own recipes, but you can modify them if you like):

Top Reason No. 1:
Spicy Pork and Beans Taco Filling
1 pound pork fillet
2 bay leaves
1 tsp black pepper corns
1 cup pre-cooked pinto or kidney beans
1 large onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1 dried ancho chile
1 dried pasilla chile
3 tbls oil
2 large peeled tomatoes, chopped
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp cumin powder
1 tbls sea salt