Lets eat beans for every meal.

I hesitate to give you this recipe because it is so freaking unbelievably good.  And its really freaking unbelievably easy.  Freak yeah it is.

What you need:

1 pound of dried whole pinto beans

4 garlic cloves

12ish peppercorns

Salt to taste

Here’s how to make it.

Soak the beans overnight (best method) or if you forgot, use the quick soak method on the bag of beans.

Rinse the soaked thoroughly and put in a crock pot.  Cover with about 2 inches of water and turn it on high.

Now you need to figure out how to make what chefs/French people call a “sachet d’épices”.  This is basically a bag to put your spices (in this case the garlic and the peppercorns) in so they don’t mingle with the beans.  If you have cheesecloth hooray for you,  if not I came up with an alternative that works great.  First, heres a picture of what a real sachet looks like.

Sachet d'épice

I don’t happen to have cheesecloth laying around, so I carefully dismantled a tea bag, dumped all the tea out, put all the spices in and tied it up.  It worked great, just be careful not to rip it.  Anyway, crush the garlic and about half of the peppercorns and place all in the sachet.  Also, you might want to use an additional tea bag so you don’t overload one.

Check the beans and stir about every hour.  Its probably gonna take 6 hours or so.  If the beans start drying out on top, you don’t have enough water, add another cup.  The beans are finished when they are tender enough to eat.  Remove some of the excess juice and reserve it.  Use your stick blender to blend them in the crock pot, or let them cool and do batches in your food processor, or mash them with a potato masher, I don’t really care what you do, just get them to your desired texture.  I like em smooth and slightly runny (I use most of the reserved juice).

Salt to taste (remember, don’t salt until you’re done cooking, salt can retard the bean cooking process), and serve.

I think thats it.