Snow, Beans & Cornbread

This has been a stay at home week, we had snow, lots of it for us, at least a foot deep... a lot of is has melted off, but now I can't get off of my road, I tried to go out yesterday, but I never made it past the first hill, I got a quarter of the way up and came to a stop, oh my wheels were turning, but I wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't because of the snow either, most of it has melted off, but the roads are now mushy clay, even those with 4 wheel drive are getting stuck here and there.

So today I decided it would be a good day for a pot of beans, I meant to start these soaking last night but I went to bed early and it never happened. So today I picked and cleaned the beans, put them in the pressure cooker with plain water, brought them up to pressure then turned them off. When the pressure let off on its own, I opened the pot, poured the beans into a colander and rinsed them, returned the beans to the pot and added 1 can of Campbells French onion soup and a large can of beef stock, I added some oil and hot & mild chili powder, then started the beans cooking again.

So what goes better with beans than cornbread? I quickly realized I didn't have any cornmeal, I don't often use it and only buy it when I have a purpose for it, I began looking around for something, anything I could use to substitute for cornmeal, I have masa, but I didn't think that would work very well, I even eyeballed a bag of corn chips... then I remembered I had a #10 can of freeze dried corn, I have ground up popcorn before to make cornbread and it worked pretty well, I figured the freeze dried corn would work at least as well.

I don't follow a recipe to make cornbread, I just take 1 cup cornmeal, 1 cup flour, some baking powder, some salt, sugar (I like my cornbread sweet), an egg, some oil and enough milk to turn it into a batter, pour it into a greased pan and cook it until it's done.

So I opened the can of freeze dried corn, I measured out a little more than a cup, put it into a heavy duty zipper baggie, I used a rolling pin to crush the corn, freeze dried corn is very easy to crush, it came out to just about a cup of crushed corn, I used it along with the rest of the ingredients and baked it in the oven. I did omit the sugar on this one, I tasted the corn and the batter, it turns out that freeze dried corn is very sweet on its own.

Well, I have to say that the cornbread turned out great! The texture is just a little finer than regular cornbread, other than that, you would never know it started out as freeze dried corn! Oh and the beans turned out pretty good too. :)




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I'm In Love

This will be a quickie, what I am in love with is the smaller version of a pressure cooker. A couple of days ago, I was at a friend's house, she had a brand new pressure cooker, it appears to be either a 4 or 6 quart, this is not a big, canner sized unit. We had been talking about learning how to use one, I looked at the booklet that came with it and saw that it cooks most things in minutes, yes in minutes! I was blown away, I knew that pressure cookers cooked much quicker, but I had no idea just how fast these work.

I found the page for pinto beans, it says to cook pinto beans for 3 to 6 minutes. I had to try it, so I found a bag of pintos, I picked the whole bag, but only used half the bag. I placed the beans in a bowl of water with a pinch of baking soda and covered it. The next day when I went over to my friend's house, I brought the fixens for making tortillas. I poured out the bean water, rinsed the beans, placed them in the pressure cooker, added a chopped onion and some chili powder. I poured water up to the half way mark, put on the lid, locked it down and put it on the fire. It takes 5 to 10 minutes to come up to pressure. Once up to pressure I turned down the flame, just enough to keep the rocker rocking. I timed it for 6 minutes, then remembered that at high altitude you have to add more cooking time so I added 2 more minutes.

I had serious doubts that it would be cooked completely through in that little time, but I followed the directions. I made a double batch of flour tortillas while the beans were cooking. Once the timer went off, I turned off the fire and allowed the pressure cooker to come down by itself. That took about 15 minutes, of course the beans are still cooking during that time. Once the tortillas were done, the beans were ready to come out, I was not sure that the cooker was fully de-pressurized so I put it in the sink and ran cold water over it. I didn't have to do that, but I felt better about opening it afterward.

Once opened, the beans were perfectly cooked, all were soft but not falling apart. I then seasoned it with salt and I minced a pickled serrano chili pepper, that went into the pot. Then we tasted it. It was delish! We ate a bowl of beans each, with a couple of rolled up tortillas to go with it. Man was it good! My friend has been eating these beans for the last two days, she tells me every day how good they are. Now I need to find our small pressure cooker, I have a canner, but I also have a smaller pressure cooker that will be perfect. We can't afford the propane or electricity to cook a pot of pintos in the traditional manner, cooking for hours and hours. With the pressure cooker, I can afford to run the propane for the amount of time it would take to cook a pot of beans. I'll post more about this soon, stay tuned!

OK, so this isn't as much as a quickie as I thought... I tried. LOL!



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Wretha,
properly pronounced wreetha, (included for the text reader),


Thanks for visiting!

The Great (Pinto) Bean Experiment

Tuesday
I ground about 6 pounds of dry, uncooked pinto beans. The idea is to cut down the cooking time. I ground them using a heavy, cast iron corn grinder. So I ground the beans in batches, first I picked the beans, if you have never cooked beans like this, you'd be shocked at what ends up in the package with the beans... rocks, dirt clods, mystery beans, corn, bug eaten beans, mystery seeds, bits of this and that, and the occasional non-organic item, I have no idea what the white, plastic thing is that I found in the beans.

After I picked the beans, I would place a handful of beans in a barely dampened towel and shake the beans around in the towel. Beans tend to come covered in grit, dirty, one should wash them, but since I was about to grind them, I didn't want to run the risk of grinding moistened dry beans, they might not store as well.

I ran them through the mill on a medium setting, enough to break them into smaller pieces, then I ran it through again on a tighter setting to grind it to nearly a powder, about the consistency of cornmeal. Now, what to put the bean meal in... I thought about zip-lock bags, then decided against it. Mountain Man Bob drinks lots of coffee with creamer, I try to buy the largest and cheapest creamer in the store. We have LOTS of empty (large) creamer containers, so I grabbed one of them. It worked perfectly! Each container holds about 1 and a half bags of bean meal. I filled 3 of them.

That all happening yesterday, I'm not as sore as I thought I might be, especially my right arm, my grinding arm. My hands are a bit sore, but all in all, it's not bad at all.

Last night I wanted to test how this bean meal cooks up. I put about a cup and a half of bean meal in a pan, added twice as much water and gave it a stir (no salt yet, it toughens the beans), I started them on high until it boiled then dropped it to low. I covered the pan and let it go. It really went through the water, about every 15 minutes, I would add another half cup of water and stir. About 2 hours later, the beans still had a raw bean taste and were gritty. I added a pinch of baking soda and continued cooking and adding water.

Well, it ended up taking nearly 4 hours to cook, that is far too long for me. The idea is to cut down on the cooking time, therefore using less propane. Once the beans were done, I seasoned them, salt, pepper, ground coriander seeds, filé powder... they were pretty tasty.

I decided to go ahead and try dehydrating the cooked bean paste. I poured the bean paste into sheet pan lined with parchment paper, I made sure the layer was thin. I placed this in a small (microwave sized) convection oven, propped the door open about a half inch using a butter knife, then turned on the oven on low. It took a few hours to completely dry. I had to stir the bean paste around, break it up to allow it to fully dry. Then I took the dry bean paste and ran it through the food processor to grind it into small pieces. It looks like coffee.

The only thing I didn't do was rehydrate it and taste it. I'll do that later.

Since I determined that the bean meal doesn't cook any faster, I took about a cup and a half of bean meal, added water and covered, it was left to sit all night, the idea is that soaked beans cook faster. We will see today.

Thursday
OK, the soaked bean meal did cook faster, in about 2 hours, but it's still not any faster than cooking whole beans. So now I have decided the only way I am going to cook pinto beans faster is to use a pressure cooker. Fortunately we have 2 of them, a big one for canning and a smaller one for cooking. Just have to check the rubber gasket to make sure it's still OK, might do a test boil with just water to make sure it seals good.

BTW, dehydrating the cooked beans did work, I put some of the dehydrated beans in a pan, poured in quite a bit of water and heated it all up, They were pretty tasty.

Honestly, after all of this, I have decided that for now, I can and will continue buying instant refried beans, I can get them at the store in town, I can also get them from Sam's Club, they sell a 3 pound bag of instant refried beans for around $6, can't beat that for now. Unfortunately the only Sam's that carries them that I know of is in El Paso, at least 3 hours away. For now I know someone who goes out there several times a month (doctor visits), so I can stock up on them. At least I know that I can dehydrate refried beans for storage and eating later. :)




All written text and audio podcast from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment., but please do not distribute (text or audio) without written permission.

Wretha,
properly pronounced wreetha (included for the text reader),

Thanks for visiting!