The Musical Fruit... I Mean Legume

Okay. Confession. I remembered about dinner this time. In fact I remembered the day before. That is why I started soaking my pinto beans. This was so mouth-wateringly delicious I have to share it with you.

Frijoles Pintos de Tirienne

• 1 lb dry pinto beans
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• water

• 32 oz beef stock
• 16 oz water
• 2 large cloves garlic, whole
• 1/4 tsp crushed red pepper
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 1 tsp chili powder
• salt to taste
• hot sauce (Louisiana style is delicious on this)

Okay, so sorry people if you were looking for a fast recipe, keep looking. This one is going to take all night (literally.) In a large container or bowl dump your pinto beans and cover them with the lemon juice and at least three inches of water. Soak overnight. I didn't tell you to sort through your beans and pick out the bad ones because 1. I'm lazy and never do that myself and 2. I've never actually found a bad bean/stone/beetle/dry booger in a bag of beans. 

About 8-9 hours before you want to serve your beans, meaning around 9:00am drain your beans and add them, the stock and water to your slow cooker.

What I'd like you to do next is add all of your espicy things! EXCEPT FOR! This is very important, EXCEPT FOR THE SALT. Otherwise you will compromise the beans' integrity and besides that being morally awkward ('cause I like to think of y'all as the morally upright kind who wouldn't want to compromise anyone's integrity) it's just going to be unpleasant in your mouth.

Now that you've added all the nice things to spice it up, give it a good stir, cover it up, set it on low for 8-9 hours and go about your business. Ahh... time to pour a nice beverage.

PEOPLE. Seriously. That is grape juice and sparkling water. It's 9:00am for goodness sake. And I will never be enough of a lush to drink that much wine at once. Yikes. 

While we are waiting for the beans I want to tell you a little story. Which is that in our current (but not for much longer) apartment we have a really cool pantry cupboard. It has about a zillion slots and when we moved in our landlord said he had never seen anyone fill it. To me this meant only one thing. CHALLENGE!! So while I was waiting for my beans, I went shopping and then took photographic evidence to show that I'm doing a pretty darn good job filling this sucker up. Check it out. 

Yes, we really do own that many chips. But it's pretty good, right? I mean come on. Notice in the last photo my secret gluten stash in the bottom right corner of the last photo... shhh...

Anyway! It is about thirty minutes before you want to serve up your beans they should look like this.

Now is the time to salt liberally. Grab that container of salt and sprinkle away! If you want to now is the time to throw some other food on to cook, maybe like these bad boys.

Bratwurst burgeoning with cheddar cheese and jalapenos... mmm so good. We also had a simple green salad to go with this. Your beans should be about done by now, creamy on the inside slightly firm on the outside. You by no means have to do this but when our bratwurst were done I turned the pan up high and added a few spoonfuls of beans to get them really hot. It was delicious... Enjoy responsibly.

Much love,
Tirienne