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Thursday, June 05, 2008

Guess what I learned?

Camy from the Well-Trained Mind forums posted the following recipe:

Directions on how to have a great lunch that is healthy, delicious, fairly simple, and inexpensive:

1. Place pinto beans in a crock pot w/ enough water to cover by 3 inches. I normally use about 5 cups of beans. Soak overnight.
2. When you get up in the morning, turn the crock pot on high (check to see if you need to add more water. Sometimes the beans absorb much of the water). Cook for about 3 hours. Check for doneness w/ a knife by breaking a bean in half. If tender, they're done.
3. Warm your tortillas. We do this by either wrapping a stack of tortillas in foil and placing in the oven on 375 degrees until warm (about 15 minutes), warming them one at a time on a hot cast iron skillet, or popping them in the toaster one by one for a more crisp tortilla. Make sure to watch them carefully in the toaster. They can burn quickly if you are not careful.
4. While tortillas are warming, drain cooked beans in a large strainer. Put beans in a bowl or back in the crock pot (turn on low). Mash the beans and add a shake of onion powder, garlic powder, cumin, & a dash of salt. You could also add a small can of chopped green chillies for more flavor. Take note to add more of the spices if you use more beans. Keep taste-testing to get flavorful results.
5. Prepare any desired toppings (i.e. lettuce, cheese, tomatoes, onions, peppers, sour cream, guacamole, salsa, etc.) . We stay very simple.
6. Serve mashed beans in tortillas and top w/ your choice of the above.

Sounds good, right? And fairly simple? Yes, well, here's where the learning part comes in.

I learned:
1. Five pounds of pinto beans doesn't look like that much when you put it in your slow cooker.
2. Five pounds of pinto beans comes dangerously close to overflowing said slow cooker, once they've absorbed the water you put in to soak them.
3. You can't keep enough water in the slow cooker to cook all five pounds of beans, beacuse the beans expand past the top edge of the basin.
4. The ones on top stay crunchy. This seems to hold true even if you stir the beans several times.
5. Five pounds of beans will NOT be ready for lunch time.
6. This many beans fits - barely - into my Tupperware Thatsa Bowl. I still managed to make quite a mess while squishing them up. I quickly gave up on the potato masher and got out my hand mixer, which worked much better.
7. This many beans makes approximately enough to feed lunch to our entire church, with leftovers.

The moral of the story is, if you find a bag of pinto beans in the back of your cupboard, it's probably not the best plan to try to cook them all at once.

Anyone know if you can freeze squished pinto beans?

1 comment:

  1. FIVE POUNDS!! Are you kidding? Yes, they should freeze just fine!

    Laughing at you, not with you! LOL!

    Love, Susan

    ReplyDelete