Cooking Beans

We've all heard the term Beans, Bullets, and Bandaids.  While the term Beans really means have a large storage of food, how many of you actually cook dry beans?  It's one of the easiest, cheapest, most nutritious foods you can make.  If you  read the directions on a bag of beans you may get a little scared.  Soak, boil for a couple of minutes, soak some more, simmer forever or boil hard for an hour.  I've made beans by putting the beans and water into canning jars and processing the jars for an hour.  You get a canner full of jarred beans and they are ready to eat at any time.  I used to do it that way.  Now I cheat and do it the easy way, except my easy way does take all day.  I also have electricity which I may not always have. 

I bought a $9.99 crock pot from Walmart that holds 1 1/2 quarts.  It has three settings, off, low, high.   I put two cups of beans in the crock pot in the morning, fill the thing with water, put the lid on and turn it on low.  By the time I'm ready to make dinner they are done cooking.

Tonight I didn't get home until 9:00 since I had to work out of town.  My daughter and son-in-law made dinner for themselves and the grandkids.  Usually what they cook isn't edible, which explains why they go out to eat at least once a day.  Tonight they made Tuna Helper.  Daughter said it's pretty good and I should try it.  She said they also had cornbread.  I looked on the counter and there was a package from the bakery.  They spent four dollars on a small little loaf of cornbread.  They could have bought a Jiffy brand box of cornbread mix, added water, and it would have been the same as what they bought.  Yuck...

Daughter complained that I wasn't home to show her how to make cornbread.  I guess reading a cookbook, of which we have over 100 would have been too hard. 

She didn't use the beans.  I pointed out that my food bill is usually low because we use "non-instant" food like dried beans.  I asked how much beans cost when you buy them in the cans.  Son-in-law said $1.69 a can.  Well, I just cooked up three cans worth of beans.  It would cost them over five dollars to buy the beans.  It cost me under seventy five cents.  It's really a good way to stretch your food storage dollar.

Daughter said we can have chili tomorrow and cornbread.  It's a three day weekend for the grandkids.  I think we will probably have about six or seven grandkids over this weekend.  Good, I'll swap chores for all the delicious chili they can eat.  I need to cook up another pot of beans.  Perhaps I'll make daughter finish her Tuna Helper.