Easy bean recipes

Bean there, done that...

We eat a lot of legumes in our house. We all enjoy them and we have several favourite recipes that we use often. I thought it might be fun to do a "week of beans" and post a week's worth of our favourite bean recipes here.

Last night we had black bean tortillas - W asked for them when we were making up our week's menu. This month we have been trying to use up food from our freezers so the menu is really reflecting that. When the boys are deciding what they will make on their night to cook we have this little conversation.

Me - Does it use something from the freezer, the cold room and the pantry?

Them - Well, it uses something from the pantry.

Me - Not good enough!! ;-) Think of something that uses an ingredient from each. Bonus points for several ingredients from the freezer. ;-)

So now it has become almost like a challenge for us - how many ingredients can YOU use from the freezer in your dinner?? We're thinking that whoever uses the most freezer ingredients in one dinner should get the freezer award - an ice cream sundae. (except we have no ice cream in our freezer) :-(

Anyway here is last night's dinner and I did pretty well. When I cook beans I soak and cook them in big batches and then freeze them on cookie sheets. When they are frozen then I store them in freezer bags. This way I always have beans cooked and on hand.

In our cast iron fry pan I cooked up:

1 bag of previously cooked and frozen black beans

1 container of stewed tomatoes (mine have onions, garlic, peppers and zucchini in them)

1 cob of corn (frozen last summer on the cob with husk left on. I just cut of the kernels and threw them in)

Simmer and add some cumin, chili powder (made from our hot peppers), herbamare and a splash of Bragg's.

At the same time I cooked up some rice (also stored in glass jars in the freezer because I buy it in bulk. It is a rice mix and has brown rice in so needs to be stored in cool spot). I cooked enough rice for two meals because I wanted some extra to use in a lentil casserole the next night.

Put rice on tortillas (also in freezer because we stock up when they are on sale) add black bean mixture and then top as you like. We use some grated cheese and sometimes avocado. My boys like to mix Frank's red hot sauce in with some sour cream and put that on as well. When we have lettuce we put that on as well. Yum! We all love these. We served them with leftover squash (from the cold room) that I had cooked the night before when we were using the oven for lasagna.

So...

beans, rice, stewed tomatoes, corn, tortillas. That's 5 things from the freezer and 1 thing (squash) from the cold room. Beat that guys. I'm on my way to the ice cream sundae award.

:-)

Wait, I forgot...I used a cube of parsley from the freezer too. That makes 6 freezer things and 1 coldroom thing. ;-)