Sooner or later in our lean times someone tells us, “Well, you just have to eat rice and beans.” Um, we’ve been eating rice and beans for a loooong time now; we never stopped eating them.
Last week our local grocery had a sale on dried beans so I bought some black beans to vary our weekly pot of white bean and vegetable soup. When we got home, I realized that they weren’t black beans but red and I already had a superabundance of red beans. No problem, we were looking for an addition to our menu; we’ll have Red Beans & Rice—my husband is an ace with seasonings. This is a week for using “what we’ve got”.
Dried beans are very inexpensive for the volume of food they make—a bag typically costs $1.29—on sale .99 and can make several meals. The catch is that they have to be soaked “overnight”—I put them in water mid-morning and begin cooking them around 4pm. It’s important to wash and sort them first—the bag instructions make sure that I know that the beans “are a farm product”, which means that there could be rotten ones or even rocks in the mix. They also have to be cooked about two hours, which can pad the energy bill. Perhaps if I soaked them longer they could cook less.
For these reasons I generally discourage people for sending dried beans to food banks; the amount of planning and preparation cooking dried beans takes is often more than a severely discouraged person can manage. But if you’re looking to stretch what you’ve got—they cost still less than a comparable number of cans of beans and have less sodium.
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