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Why does nobody warn you that a slow cooker full of dried beans will double in size and wreck your whole plan
So last Tuesday I dumped 2 pounds of dried pinto beans into my slow cooker with a can of Rotel and some cumin, set it on low, and went to work thinking I was about to come home to like 8 cheap dinners. Nope. Those beans soaked up every drop of liquid and swelled into this thick paste that was trying to climb out the lid, and by the time I got back at 6 it had baked onto the outside of the pot like concrete. I stood there in my kitchen scraping burnt bean crust off the counter for 40 minutes while my roommate watched and said nothing, which somehow made it worse. Here is the part that actually stung, I had already counted those beans into my food budget for the week at 89 cents a pound and now half of it was trash. I ended up salvaging maybe 3 servings by adding a whole box of chicken broth and mashing it into a weird bean soup, but I ate that same soup four nights straight. Lesson I guess is soak them first and don't fill the pot past halfway, but honestly I want to know if the bean paste is fixable in some other dish because I still have a container of it in the fridge and I refuse to toss $2 of food. Has anyone turned a bean disaster into something decent, or do I just cut my losses and pitch it?
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cole3561d ago
Cook it down further with a jar of salsa and a chipotle pepper and you basically have refried beans, which freeze fine in zip bags flattened out. The trick is to stop thinking of it as soup and start treating it like a spread, so tacos, tostadas, quesadillas, even thinned out as a dip. Two bucks of beans is worth saving, but the real cost was those four nights of sad soup, so change the shape of the food and you change the whole deal.
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