august will be good august will be good august will be good august will be good august will be good august will be good august will be good august will be good august will be good august will be good august will be good
Child Grace staring out his window wondering if aliens are real while Rocky was already waiting on that ship, pressed against a similar wall wondering when someone would come
(PS beans and rice combine into the perfect protein. Nice cheap way to keep your nutrition reasonably intact)
How to Treat A Bean Right, Because Recession
There is a whole wide world of different beans and legumes, from the humble navy bean stewed down to maximum heartiness to the elegant black lentil tossed in a lemon and dill vinaigrette topped with poached salmon. Unfortunately I see a ton of people just dumping some beans out of a can onto a plate and wondering why their McDonald's cued palates can't stand them. My dudes, beans are a staple in nearly every culture and they didn't get that way by unseasoned tinny chalk balls. Here's how to bean.
Selecting Beans
Beyond skipping over the canned when you can, not all dried beans are created equal. While they have a super long shelf life in regards to safety and not inculcating anything that would give us a food born illness they have a shelf life of about one year max in terms of quality. This means that the dusty bag on the bottom of the shelf in a suburban grocery store full of non bean eaters might do you wrong unexpectedly. Cooking will take longer, they may never actually get creamy, you may have a lot of withered "floaters" that never soften. Your best bet (in the USA) is to hit up stores that cater to Hispanic populations or vegetarians. Bulk bins are a great sign but not 100% necessary. A Mexican grocery store near me has bulk bins of pinto, black beans, and occasionally mayocoba as well as fresh(!) chickpeas on occasion. A trip to whole foods or a natural food store will net me cannelini beans or great northern beans and a whole rainbow of lentils that even when buying fancy pants organic are still cheaper than almost any other food staple. Have an Indian or Ethiopiangrocery store near you? Stock the heck up, and grab spices while you are there. More on that later. The only beans I really buy at big box supermarkets are ones that have them stocked near the middle height of the shelf (spots reserved for higher turnover items) and bags of 15 Bean Soup.
Bean Prep
Once you have your beans look them over a bit before you cook them. A quick rinse in a large bowl of water to get any dust or dirt off, make sure there are no small stones mixed in, and toss any withered up floaters you see.
I have taken a lot of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's great research and food science to heart and he and Daniel Gritzer have a pretty exhaustive bean guide up on Serious Eats if you want the chemistry but the short take away is you only need to soak thicker skinned beans, soaking can take away some of the quality variability if you don't know if the beans are fresh, soaking can leach away flavor and nutrients of thin skinned beans like black beans, and you should cook your beans with salt.
If you are soaking you want to put your beans in a large container like a bowl or a Cambro, and cover them with cold water that is about twice their height. If you have an inch-thick layer of beans you want two inches of water above them. Let them sit 8 to 24 hours then cook them up.
Don't add acid until after cooking, and if your tap water has a low pH to where you find beans don't seem to get tender you should cook them with a smidge of baking soda. Start off with half a teaspoon per pound of beans in order to not effect the flavor too much, and adjust as needed to figure out hour much you need depending on how hard or soft your water is. (Most people will not have to adjust their water pH though, this is just outlier troubleshooting.)
Bean Cooking Methods
My Granny knew what was up with pressure cookers. And now that they are improved so much with new model stove top ones and electric ones like the Instant Pot where the risk of blowing beans into your ceiling is negligible it's one of the best investments for any home cook, even outside of the bean diet. If you don't want to get one though you will need a large pot with a lid on the stove or a dutch oven in a 250F oven with the lid slightly offset
Pressure cooking lets you skip soaking without consequence more than any other method, even with older beans. You don't have to worry about evaporation while cooking. It gives you the maillard reaction throughout the liquid unlike a dutch oven which only accomplishes it on the perimeter (and not at all with the slow cooker), and it's fast. With an electric one you automate the entire process as well.
Pressure cookers allow less evaporation so you will want your bean to water ratio to be less than other methods but soaking comes into play. I'm about 900 feet above sea level. For soaked beans I cover them with one inch of water above the level of the beans, for unsoaked I cover with two inches of water. If you are at a higher altitude unsoaked beans might require more water. For pots and dutch ovens two inches over soaked beans and three inches over unsoaked will be adequate.
Timing will depend on the bean and the method. Smaller beans cook faster, soaked beans cook faster. They're done when they are creamy inside and firm outside with few exceptions such as red lentils. THe best way is to just check the package or google what type of bean for which method you are using
Bean Seasoning
Here's the real rub for me and my real inspiration for writing this. Y'all under season your beans. Entire wars weren't fought for spice trade routes just so people could
forget what a bay leaf was. Your basic template for flavors is going to be Aromatic + Cooking Liquid + Acid. I know it sounds like a lot going on, but frequently one ingredient can cover multiple elements and just two our of three elements will take you far.
Aromatics
• Charred onions or caramelized onions • Mirepoix or trinity • Minced garlic and/or ginger • Fennel • Herbs such as bay leaves, rosemary sprigs, thyme sprigs, sage, cilantro, parsley, oregano, epazote, tarragon • Spices such as cumin, cloves, cardamom, turmeric • Spice blends such as garam masala, Cajun seasoning, Indian curry powder blends, BBQ rubs, Berebere • Chilis. Jalapeno, serrano, dried guajillo, canned chipotles in adobo, hatch chilies, canned diced green chilies. Just chilies.
Cooking Liquid
• Stock or broth is bare minimum. Get Better than Bouillon or a similar concentrated stock paste if you don't want to make your own but if you ever buy a rotisserie chicken you should really try making your own. l've used miso paste before when I had nothing else on hand. • A few shakes of Liquid Smoke. • Canned diced tomatoes (with or without chilies) • Some shakes of Fish Sauce AKA Nam Pla • A bit of Worcestershire • A glug of wine • Some beer (maintenance mode)
Acid
Once it's finished cooking a little acid can go a long way. A splash of vinegar, a squeeze of lime or lemon, hot sauce buffalo sauce, and suddenly the dish has new heights and depths.
[ HEADS UP FROM ALT TEXT ADDER: DO NOT ADD ACID WHEN COOKING IN A CAST IRON POT. It will react to the material and make everything taste nasty. This includes tomatoes! ]
Bonus
A bit of chorizo. Nduja. Some thick smoked ham, or even a bone from a smoked ham. A few sausages. A smoked turkey leg. Tasso. Andouille. A few slices of diced bacon. If it's meaty and salty and you don't have enough to make a meal of it use it as a flavoring agent in beans,
Storing Cooked Beans
Fridge 'em for 5 or 6 days without issue in a covered container or freeze them. Beans freeze wonderfully and you can bulk cook these, put some in a quart ziplock bags and freeze them up to 6 months. This is a great way to cycle through different flavors or types if you are getting burnt out.
Bean Flavor Combos
• Black beans + bell peppers, onions, garlic + bay leaves
• Black beans + onions + orange peel + all spice
• Black Beans + cumin and onion + cilantro + lime
• Pinto beans + onion and jalapeno + cumin and epazote
Reblogging the Alt Text version and adding two links I took from other reblogs:
The first is an FDA advisory basically saying that you shouldn't use a slow cooker on beans because they won't reach a temperature high enough to break down natural toxins found in some beans. They also state that dried beans should be soaked for at least 5 hours before boiling for at least 40 minutes (to neutralize the previously mentioned toxins).
The second link is the reddit source:
I also recommend going into the reblogs because there are a bunch of recipes and tips, including ones for people on digestive restrictions.
btw I’ve found these stretches from the WAK blog very helpful when knitting a lot:
Plus make sure to take breaks regularly - and stop if anything starts to hurt!
especially with gift knitting I know it can be tempting to push through it for a deadline, but it’s really not worth causing long term injury. (And anyone knit-worthy should be understanding of that, imho.) Stay well :)
huge fan of when characters love each other and are closely bonded in an explicitly nonromantic way. however ☝️ i am very much not a huge fan of what happens when characters like this are introduced to fandom
reblogged a post with a correction about spray sunscreens (they work way less well than you think) but then decided the very small number of people who might see my reblog wasn't worth the likelihood that people would read it as me discouraging sunscreen use and come to yell at me so i deleted it.
but FYI, here in my own post:
spray sunscreens don't work very well
neither do (most) sunscreen sticks
in general, michelle wong (a.k.a. lab muffin beauty science), a chemistry PhD who is very passionate about sunscreen and spends a lot of time debunking sunscreen misinformation, is a useful resource for learning about sunscreen! both the above links go to videos she made. here is another: many many sunscreen questions answered
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