Beans - Whaddaya do with 'em? - Part 2

Now that you know how to prepare the beans for cooking, how do you do that? First, some general bean-cooking guidelines from our friends at WaltonFeed again...

Cooking: After soaking, most people cover the beans with water then boil them. This can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours, depending on the bean. You should check them for softness every 15-30 minutes then pull them off the heat when they've reached their desired softness. But you can also throw them in a crock pot in the morning and let them go until the evening. And beans can be ground into a flour cook up almost instantly into a soup or paste, depending on how much water you use.

If you've boiled your beans for several hours and they still haven't softened, it's probably because they are old. Old, air stored beans 5 or more years old get 'hardened' and may never soften up. There are two ways of getting around this. You can put them in a pressure cooker for 45-60 minutes and this should do the trick, or you can grind them. Incidentally, normal beans that aren't 'hard' cook in about 20 minutes is a pressure cooker. Hardened beans still contain much of their nutrition.

After your beans are cooked, add your flavorings, meat, vegetables or whatever you are adding to make the bean dish you are preparing. Don't add these ingredients while the beans are cooking as there are many ingredients that will increase the beans' cooking time before they become soft. This includes the acidic foods which include tomatoes, lemon juice, vinegar and similar ingredients. Adding a bit of cooking oil, butter or margarine to the cooking beans will help to keep the foaming down as they cook. Consider cooking a double batch and freezing the beans not used immediately. Beans soaked for 12 hours or more often have a more uniform shape than quick soaked beans. Cooked beans will store nicely in your refrigerator for a week and they freeze nicely for a minimum of 6 months.

Probably the easiest dish to create from beans is a soup. My dad used to love pinto beans. We'd boil the beans with some onions, add some seasoning, and he'd suck the bowl dry. Beans and cornbread, those were his favorite combination. You could make a soup out of practically any bean. Just boil the beans and start adding stuff in like you would a vegetable soup. Nothing complicated about it.