I know a lot of people cook beans every day for most of their lives. But for me it was new. So, things I learned:
- a standard 15oz can of beans contains 1.75 cups of beans
- canned and cooked-from-dry beans are interchangeable in most recipes
- 1 cup of dried beans becomes 3 cups of cooked beans
- when cooking beans from dry, use 4 cups of water for 1 cup of beans
- soaking dry beans before cooking them isn’t necessary
- cooking dry beans in a pressure cooker is fun and convenient, and cooking them in a pot on the stove is fun too. Both make your house smell great; add water, a tablespoon of salt, a dollop of olive oil, and a bay leaf.
- the bean cooking water is delicious
- eating lots of beans tends to cause you to eat more vegetarian, except that it also tends to cause you to eat a lot more bacon
- there are so many kinds of beans! beans have so many names!
- budget grocery stores have a great selections of canned and dry beans
- your Indian grocery store might deliver and it opens up a whole world of possibilities with curry leaves and paneer and exciting snacks
- beans are grown in Canada and the USA but they aren’t often available as local produce. BC doesn’t grow many beans except for planting.
- you can grow 1 small serving of beans (63 beans) per summer if you plant four containers of bush beans on your deck
- don’t bother with black bean brownie recipes that are just beans and eggs; the texture is bad, they need flour or oats.
- 10g of fiber in a meal is good, 3g of fiber in a cookie is great
- you can replace half the flour and/or oil in many baking recipes with the same volume of mashed beans
- mashing beans with a fork or potato masher works well, but your teenager will like it better if you puree properly in the blender
- PlanToEat is great for recipe storage, meal planning, and grocery list generating; MyFitnessPal is good for calculating calories in recipes.
- you can usually add more beans than the recipe calls for 🙂