BEAN THERE, DONE THAT

A woman of my age needs more fiber in the diet, so expressed my physician a few years ago.

Beans are a high fiber food item so whenever they were on sale, my pantry was being stocked with cans of my favorites: garbanzo, black and red kidney. Having rinsed them, they’d be incorporated into lunch salads, soups, and chili or marinated and chilled in the refrigerator.

What escaped me was the level of sodium per serving in the beans. Canned beans became poison to my body. Not wanting to eliminate the fiber from my diet, the alternative was to use dry beans.

At first, this was too time consuming. Chili was a 2-day project! One day to soak beans, one day to cook them and then prepare the chili. For a busy working woman, this took too much time. Tinkering with ideas on reducing the chili prep time, I invested in a pressure cooker.

Fearful of this device as a child, the new appliance came with a CD of visual instructions. This became my new “go to” device to cook beans.

Before going to bed on Saturday nights, I’d soak my beans and they would be ready for cooking in the morning. If I didn’t have time to cook them the next day, I’d rinse and store in the refrigerator. Cooked in a pot, this would take 90 minutes but in the pressure cooker they were done in 10-13 minutes. Pressure cooking was my time saver!

A bag of beans yields three times the amount of beans of my cans. This method came to save me money! Cooking an entire bag, I could freeze the unused beans as ingredients for another lunch or dinner since they were cooked and ready to use. Storing in Ziploc bags leaving some room for expansion, dry beans cooked in my pressure cooker saved me time, money and allowed me to allocate my sodium to another food item!

SOUND THE BUGLE! Today’s tip: If you live near a farmer’s market or an ethnic grocery store where you can buy beans in bulk, the cost will be even cheaper than the individual one pound bags.

                                                                     BLACK EYE PEA SALAD

     

 

COOKED GARBANZO BEANS

 

BLACK EYE PEAS READY FOR THE FREEZER

 

COOKED RED BEANS WITH COOKED RICE