Bean Efficiency

We've been shying away from using beans in everyday dinners for several months. Then at our most recent hot dog cookout last Saturday, as I was putting out side dishes, I had a thought that baked beans or BBQ beans would be so good with that meal. And I've often thought how quick and easy bean and cheese burritos would be to make on a night when I needed a meal on the table in a hurry. But alas, cooking beans from dried requires advanced planning.

On Monday afternoon I was restocking containers of dried foods in the pantry, and I saw that the pinto bean container was about empty. This was the end of the previous sack of pintos, and I have a replacement sack of pintos ready to be opened. So I decided to cook up all of the older pinto beans and prepare them in a couple of ways that my family would enjoy.

And that's what I did. I cooked up the pintos, refrigerated them overnight (I got a late start cooking beans on Monday), then today I made enough refried beans for 3 family meals of burritos or beans to go on nachos and 2 family meals of BBQ beans to have with a hot dog cookout or to serve with cornbread and salad/fruit for a simple supper type of meal. I've now got 5 family meals of cooked and seasoned beans to help ease us back into putting beans on our meal rotation.

I know, a lot of folks cook up lots of beans at once and can or freeze those cooked beans. I just haven't consistently been one of those people. So this was my version of cooking beans once to eat for several meals.