Heavenly Homemakers

Encouraging women in homemaking, healthy eating and parenting

How to Cook Beans in the Crock Pot

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Cooking beans is crazy easy. It’s remembering to soak them the night before that is the hard part.

My morning brain and my night brain are two completely different beasts. My morning brain is like, “Wooooo yeah! We gonna cook all day and do school work with the kids (let’s do art today!) and organize ourselves completely and make all the phone calls and make 20 quarts of applesauce and finish the laundry and write two blog posts! Let’s do this!”

As the days wears on, I knock out about three of my twenty lofty goals (because my time and energy always run out before my to-do list ends –  and also because I hate making phone calls). After a full day of thinking hard and working hard and loving hard, my night brain is like, “I’m not speaking to you right now.”

This is why it is hard to soak beans.

The irony is that I never forget to grind coffee beans at night to put into my coffee pot for easy coffee making the next morning. Obviously, I have my priorities. Perhaps my two bean worlds could collide and I could let my coffee beans trigger a reminder about my pintos? It only makes sense.

On the rare occasion I do remember to soak beans, I feel so accomplished when I get into bed at night. Forget all the other stuff I did for 15 hours all day long. I totally put my beans in a pot with water! I am so very amazing!

Once the beans have been soaked, we can put them into a crock pot to cook all day for our dinner that night.

How to Cook Beans in a Crock Pot

How to Cook Beans in a Crock PotYum

1. At night before bed, put about 4 cups of any variety of beans into a pot with 6-8 cups of water.

2. Splash in a little vinegar. It’s supposed to help with the toots. I offer no guarantees.

making beans1

3. Let the beans soak overnight.

4. Strain and rinse them in the morning. Put them into a crock pot and cover them with fresh water.

5. Add a couple of chopped onions to the post for flavor. This is optional but yummy and recommended.

6. Cover and cook the beans on low for 8-10 hours or until they are tender.

multitasking 5

At this point, you can enjoy your beans in any way you enjoy beans. Our favorites are:

What are your favorite ways to eat beans? Please tell me about your morning brain vs. your night brain. Which works better for you?

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The Day I Got Carried Away With the Beans

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It’s not what you think.  {and all the readers breathed a collective sigh of relief}

It’s just that last night I put beans in a bowl to soak, and then I woke up to beans that were threatening to overtake my kitchen. {Wow, Laura. Fascinating.}

beans 1

See, when you add water to beans – they grow.  They grow and they grow and they grow. So if you aren’t thinking about what you’re doing, and you scoop 13 cups of beans into a bowl, then cover the beans with water before you go to bed – beware of the growing bean monster which will greet you when you walk into your kitchen to make breakfast.

I strained the beans and added fresh water, but of course, none other than my largest stock pot would hold the monster.

beans 2

Why, you ask? Why so many beans?

I told you already. I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing.  I needed a large amount of beans for a big batch of chili, so I just kept scooping. I also forgot that beans in a bowl will soak up the water until they become bloated and ready to burst. Whoa, good morning, beans.  That. That is what I said when I walked into my kitchen this morning to find the bloated beans trying to crawl over the top of the bowl onto my counter top and floor.

I didn’t really tell the beans good morning. I don’t talk to my chili beans. Coffee beans, though – for sure. Don’t even doubt that one.

After cooking the chili beans (which of course bubbled up and overflowed onto my stove-top because I forgot that they were cooking and because there were so many of them), I realized that I had way, way too many cooked beans for the big batch of chili I was planning to make. All I’m doing is trying to do is to be prepared to feed our high school youth group on Sunday night, see? But we’re going out of town Thursday afternoon and won’t get home until late Saturday night. And I don’t know if you knew this or not, but we have to change our clocks this Saturday night, so we lose an hour of sleep.  No one asked my permission to do that this weekend.  This is not okay with me.

So in my effort to get ahead, I got very, very ahead. I have beans for chili on Sunday night to feed an army. Plus I now have three other big containers of beans in my freezer to be used another time. Yay me. I am so efficient.

chili beans 3

It seems that I just spent 404 words telling you about my beans – as if I have nothing better to talk about. Blah, blah, blah, beans. Wow everyone. Look at my beans.

So now I shall leave you with this important reminder and advice:

Do not become distracted when you are scooping beans. Stop scooping beans if you know what’s good for you. But if you forget and over-scoop, simply go ahead and freeze your cooked beans for future use.

526 words to tell you that you can freeze beans. Sometimes I amaze myself.

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Healthy Crock Pot Recipes: Calico Beans

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This Calico Beans recipe packs a punch when it comes to protein. In my household of men, this is much appreciated. Oh, who am I kidding? I may be the only girl in my household, but give me a bowl of beans, beef, and bacon, and I’m a happy camper. I love me a high protein meal! If all the boys in the house enjoy it too, well now, that’s just a huge perk. :)

Add some chopped sweet green peppers, or even a few chunks of spicy peppers to this recipe if your family enjoys a little “kick”.

Calico BeansYum

Healthy Crock Pot Recipes: Calico Beans
 
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Author:
Serves: 6-8
Ingredients
  • 8 ounces turkey bacon, cut into one-inch pieces
  • 1 pound ground beef
  • ½ cup chopped onion (or 4 Tablespoons minced onion)
  • 1 Tablespoon yellow mustard
  • 2 - 15 ounce cans baked beans (I use Eden Organics, full of healthy ingredients)
  • 1 - 15 ounce can kidney beans
  • ¾ cup ketchup (I recommend homemade ketchup or an organic variety that does not contain high fructose corn syrup)
  • 1 teaspoon sea salt
  • 1 Tablespoon vinegar (I use either red wine or balsamic)
Instructions
  1. In a skillet, brown bacon, ground beef, and onions together.
  2. Drain and dump into a crock pot.
  3. Add remaining ingredients, stirring until mixed.
  4. Cover and cook on low for six hours or on high for three hours.
  5. Or, skip the crock pot and bake this in a covered casserole dish at 350° for an hour.

Of course, you’ll save even more money if you soak and cook your own beans. Read more about this process here.

Calico Beans

I know everyone is different when it comes to craving meat and high protein meals.  Are you like me and feel like you could eat a half a cow sometimes? Or are you content with a small bowl of beans and the occasional peanut? 

Interested in more Crock Pot recipes? You’ll find several to look through here!

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Oh Beautiful Jars!! Stocked and Ready For Gawking

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One of the jobs on my “To Do” List was to refill all of the jars in my pantry so that I’d have easy access to all of the staple ingredients I reach for so often. Since I typically purchase these ingredients in 25-50 pound quantities, I store them big buckets, and pour a smaller portion into easy-access jars in my kitchen, refilling as needed. (Read more here about where I purchase most of my food, and scroll through these posts to learn more about my bulk shopping and storage.)

My favorite part of this system, besides the fact, of course, that this just makes my life easier and saves us money while we strive to eat a whole foods diet is this:  I love staring at my jars full of pretty food.

It’s a slight obsession. A major obsession? Yeah, probably something like that.

Well, after just a few minutes of going back and forth from storage room to kitchen, lugging buckets and bags of dry goods (a great upper arm work-out!), all of my jars are re-stocked and ready to go. Pasta, sucanat, wheat, salt, beans, corn, and rice. Oh so beautiful.

 This is the part of my pantry I stare at when I most need a fix:

Hey, it’s much healthier than my former Pepsi addiction, right? :)

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How I Store Bulk Food

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I received my Azure Standard food co-op order last week…one of my favorite days of the month! It’s slightly ridiculous how much I get a thrill out of boxes and bags of food. I know not everyone  has the storage space to purchase food in bulk…but this method works very well for me and I am so thankful to have this option.

As I mentioned several months ago in this post about why I buy bulk food, I don’t just buy in bulk to save money. Saving money is a wonderful perk, but I also find that buying in bulk makes cooking so much simpler for me. I don’t have to think so hard or shop so often. I buy large quantities of food items, enough to last much longer than a week. This way, I save on gas, time, energy and brain power.

I am often asked how I store my bulk purchases. Here is a little bit of explanation for what works well for me for bulk food storage:

I could just leave the food right in their bags, but I don’t feel comfortable with that for sevaral reasons. We’ve had trouble with mice in the past. Yowza, there’s not much that makes me more frustrated in the kitchen that seeing that those little rodents have gotten into and pooped in my oats. What a waste! Beyond mice, we find that if we don’t transfer food out of their bags and into something more properly sealed, it is easier for bugs to get in and ruin food.

In addition…I just feel like buckets and containers are easier to stack and store than bags. I know I’m a nerd…but I LIKE the way food looks when it’s poured into nice jars and jugs. Crumpled up bags don’t look nearly as cute in my pantry.

When my bulk purchases arrive, out come my jars, buckets and containers. I’ve accumulate quite a nice collection through the years, purchased from garage sales, Walmart or the dollar store. You know how I LOVE jars.  And in general, I avoid plastics. However, for dry food that isn’t as likely to absorb chemicals from the plastic, I’m okay with using plastic containers for bulk storage.

I take a few minutes to scoop out the sea salt or sucanat or wheat or oats or whatever dry bulk item I’ve purchased into large storage containers.

From those, I will funnel smaller amounts into smaller jars for simple cooking use. I  keep these smaller jars in the cupboard right above my stove so I can easily grab them while I’m cooking. As they get low, I refill them from their larger storage container.

Once I have everything divided into the appropriate jars and containers (I stare at it in happiness for a while and then) I put them all away in either my storage room, or in my pantry if there is space.

I especially like to keep my nicest jars full of dry bulk items like beans, rice, popcorn and pasta in my pantry door where it looks pretty everytime I open it!

You may also want to read about how I store bulk grain. And, if you’d like to see a more thorough view of my whole kitchen, I invite you to join me on my kitchen tour!

Do you buy in bulk? What have you found that works best for you to store your bulk food?

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