Pressured Beans

I am not a professional photographer. Obviously. Some days I am only lucky enough to get the lighting correct to properly portray the food. Take it as my guarantee that this is real; made and eaten in my own kitchen.

If there is anything that could be able to convince someone to invest in a digital pressure cooker, this is IT! Even after owning mine for almost two years, I still get amazed at the abilities of this little guy. Sure it can create meals, such as soup and meat, in minutes as opposed to hours, but when it can cut out overnight prep work plus hours of cooking - that is something!

During this summer, my interest in using dried beans soared. For about two weeks. I found bags of dried beans on a clearance rack, so I scooped them up. Those bright red price tags sure do catch my eye and get my mind reeling with ideas. At such a low cost, I was sure to find uses for the pinto, black, and white beans I impulse bought. Shortly after, I found a recipe to cook and can pinto beans so they are ready to be mashed and (re)fried Mexican style. Unfortunately, this was a total fail! I wasted 9 pints of beans because most of the liquid escaped from the jars while processing. Being such a dried bean novice, I had no idea how to save my poor little pintos. Not too long after that, there was another horrible bean episode. After hours of soaking and cooking, a whole pot of escarole soup went down the drain. Wasted, because the beans had refused to transform from hard little pebbles to soft buttery beans. Needless to say, I was a bit discouraged from the whole bean adventure. My remaining dried clearance beans spent the rest of the summer hanging out in the cabinet, untouched. Good thing they have a super long shelf life!

This week, I began a new kitchen journey. As I explained in my last post, my life has become so busy, that planning seems to be the only way for my frugal and (somewhat) healthy lifestyle to survive. Sunday, I took inventory of everything that was in my kitchen. The objective is to use up what you have on hand instead of purchasing items you don't really need. With this inventory, you can make up meals using mainly what you already have. A shopping list can be made according to the few ingredients you may need to tie together your upcoming recipes. I managed to only spend $27 at the grocery store this week!

One of the items I needed was black beans. Monday's meal was stuffed sweet potatoes, which calls for a can of beans. I had the choice to go out and buy a can of beans or finally get the courage to make another attempt at the dried beans in the cabinet. Since the main point of this meal planning exercise is to: use up what I already have and to avoid spending extra money; I really could not justify buying some canned black beans.

A bonus of this meal planning is knowing what needs to be prepped ahead of time. By planning Monday's meal on Sunday, I had time to soak the beans and then cook them. The main reason most people use sodium packed canned beans is because it takes too damned long to prep the dried beans. Like most of today's unhealthy lifestyle habits, it boils down to convenience. Enter the Pressure Cooker - Convenience Maker! Once I decided to use the dried beans, I had to google how to properly prep and cook them. Within five minutes, I found a website with instructions for pressure cooking beans. Since one the things hindering me from using dried beans was the amount of time to prepare them, you can imagine how excited I was! I popped right up and grabbed my pressure cooker cookbook, Slow Food Fast. True to its name, this cookbook contained a chart for cooking unsoaked beans within mere minutes! All you have to do is cover the beans with water, add 2 Tbsp oil to prevent foaming, then cook on high for the recommended amount of time according to the specific bean.

Bean cooking time in minutes:

• Black beans - 20
• Black-eyed peas - 8
• Cannellini - 35
• Garbanzo/chickpeas - 35
• Great Northern - 25
• Kidney - 22
• Lentils, green - 8
• Lentils, red or yellow - 4
• Lima - 12
• Navy - 20
• Peanuts, raw - 60
• Pinto - 22
• Scarlet Runner - 16
• Soy - 28
• Split Peas - 6

Just be sure not to fill the pressure cooker more than half full.
One cup of dried beans should make approximately 3 cups of cooked beans.

Twenty minutes as opposed to hours upon hours of cooking is much more do-able. It may take longer than simply opening a can, but it totally makes up for it when you consider the health benefits of lower sodium intake, the significant lower cost, and the reduction in consumer waste - especially if you buy from bulk bins. This is definitely the way to go!