A new slow cooked beans recipe and overly indulgent nachos

It's true. Almost every week, I cook a big pot of beans in our slow cooker to use in various ways throughout the week and also to freeze for using later. I don't know why, but a freezer full of homemade beans makes me feel secure. By having that in place, I always know that I can prepare a healthy and flavorful homemade meal even on a very busy day. I promise to get more creative with my slow cooker recipes, but this week it's another pot of beans. Instead of just connecting you back to my original black beans recipe post, though, I thought I would take a moment to rewrite a general recipe for slow cooked beans and then share with you one of my true indulgent ways to eat black beans.

Slow cooked beans:

To prepare your dried beans, pick through about a pound of beans looking for small pebbles and then rinse thoroughly in a colander. Next, place the beans in a large pot and add enough cold water to cover the beans by a few inches. Cover the pot with its lid and leave it on the counter or stove to soak overnight at room temperature. You will be thankful for the time you take to prepare and soak your beans because soaking actually speeds the cooking process (which is super helpful if you are cooking the beans on the stovetop) and creates a plumpness to the beans that you don't always get when you skip the soaking step.

This next step you can either do the night before or wait until the next morning. Finely chop a yellow or white onion and sauté it in a skillet with 3 or 4 cloves of minced garlic and a healthy pour of olive oil. Sauté until the garlic and onions become aromatic and tender. If you do this step the night before, simply cool down the garlic and onions, then cover and place in the refrigerator. If you sauté them right before you cook the beans, simply add the onion and garlic mixture to your bean pot along with any oil left in the skillet.

In the morning, drain the beans and discard the now dirty and discolored soaking water. Put your beans in a slow cooker or back in the same pot and add fresh water in a volume nearly triple the amount of beans. If you are going to be away for the day or just want the beans to cook themselves, put them in a slow cooker along with the garlic and onions, sprinkle with kosher salt, set the slow cooker to low heat, and cook for 6 hours. If you are cooking the beans on the stovetop, bring the water in your pot to a simmer and cook the beans with the onion and garlic mixture, uncovered, for 40 minutes to longer than an hour depending on the type of bean and their freshness. Stovetop bean cooking requires some hands on work because you will need to sample regularly to gauge doneness. Every time you taste, be sure to taste more than a couple of beans because they don't always cook at the same speed and a bean that's not quite cooked is icky. Season the stovetop beans with kosher salt in the last 15 minutes of cooking, when the beans are almost finished. If you season them with salt at the beginning, it sometimes makes the beans breakdown and get crumbly.

Regardless of the cooking method you choose, you will be left with a large pot of beans to enjoy in many dishes. The beans you don't plan to use in a few days should be drained and then placed in quart-size freezer bags to freeze for later.

Now, for my indulgent black bean dish that is just so tasty, bean lover or not, it's hard not to enjoy it. I'm forced to be more creative now than I was here with this dish since I have decided to eat a mostly vegan diet, but cheesy, sour creamy nachos are the way to do it...so, if you wish, pile it on!

For these, I kept it simple and topped blue corn tortilla chips with a large spoonful of black beans, steamed and lightly salted broccoli, a spoonful of sour cream, grated sharp cheddar cheese, and a heavy drizzle of hot salsa. A deliciously satisfying dinner!