Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi, and welcome to the first edition of RATV. I am your host Soozcat, the disembodied voice
in the background, and today we are going to find out how to deal with these little
suckers. That's right, dry beans. Now I have some Anasazi beans here, which are great,
because I am a lazy butt and I don't particularly like to have to soak beans and the great thing
about Anasazis is that YOU DON'T HAVE TO SOAK THEM! Thanks, Mom and Dad, for getting them
for us! So, the first thing you're going to have to do with these is that since beans
are a natural product -- they were grown in the earth, they were not put together in a
factory someplace -- as a result, they are gonna have dirt and dust and other fun things
on them. So the first thing that you do with 2 cups of beans that I just pulled out of
the pantry is you put them out on a nice clean counter (this is probably the cleanest my
counter's been in weeks, by the way) and you spread 'em all out, just like I'm doing with
my fingers. Easy peasy so far, right? OK. Now, the next
little part is probably going to be the most hands-on thing that you do with your dry beans
while you're cooking them, so be aware. This is the toughest part. If you can handle this,
you can handle everything else. Ready? You come over here, and you start looking at the
beans, pulling them to the side one by one (or multiple by multiple, if you're lazy like
me) to make sure that what you've got here is actual beans. Now, because as I said we're
working with a natural product and human beings make mistakes, occasionally, see, you'll come
across some stuff that's not a bean. This is not a bean. This is a chunk of dirt and
it's really not tasty. So -- here's another one -- we're just gonna go through and look
for chunks, rocks, dirt, things that look like beans but are not. If you're really OCD
you can come across a bean that is not an Anasazi bean and say, "Oh, you're not like
the other beans, goodbye!" but frankly it doesn't matter. As long as what you are dealing
with is always a legitimate bean as opposed to a bean-like object, you're gonna be OK.
So, we just go through here, sort sort sort, yippy skippy! I like Anasazi beans for two
reasons, actually. One is the fact that you don't have to pre-soak them, which is fantastic,
because pre-soaking can be annoying, but the other thing I kinda like about them is the
way that they look. They look like little wild ponies of the West, which is funny because
that's where they're grown. The other thing that you need to keep in mind about beans,
if you find that you like beans, is that it makes more sense to buy a large bag of beans
than a small one, because beans last for a long time. The fact that they're dried means
that they will last you a long time. They're not like a gallon of milk that lasts two weeks
tops. You can get yourself a big ol' bag of beans and store it someplace in your garage
or even in a closet somewhere and it will do you right for a long time, which is great.
OK, so, I have just finished sorting the entire 2 cups of beans. Fortunately we only had a
very few things that were not beans, or if we're being fussy about it, a bean that was
not like the others. And there's this mighty pile. Now I mentioned, 2 cups of dry beans
cook up to about 7 cups of wet beans, because they rehydrate as they cook. So this is really
kind of a deal, because that's about -- if you assume that a can of beans is about 15
oz. -- that's about 4 cans of beans for about the price of 1 to 2 cans. That's not a bad
deal. I like that.