With Cinco de Mayo just around the corner, a lot of you are busy planning menus for your various fiestas.  For me, Mexican entrees are no trouble to come up with.  Most involve some combination of tortillas, peppers, onions, possibly chicken or another protein, wonderful spices, and certainly cheese.  With that combination, it’s really hard to go wrong.  Personally I always find side dishes more challenging – how to best complement your entree and keep the meal well rounded yet doable is not an easy task.  Mexican rice and refried beans are the classic side dish staple served with practically every restaurant dinner combo out there.

In the past I mostly ignored the beans and rice entirely, pushing them to the side, until a fabulous Mexican restaurant in my hometown changed all that.  We love their entrees as well as their rice and beans…and their amazing queso dip…and the two dollar margaritas on Tuesdays don’t hurt either!  Anyway, I started liking refried beans – a lot.  But as you all know by now what I don’t like is opening cans to prepare our food.  Thankfully Elly provided an awesome base recipe that I have since made countless times and tweaked to our liking.  Homemade refried beans are very simple to make, requiring less than 20 minutes of your time.  As a bonus, they reheat very well so if you are entertaining and want to focus on your guests rather than food prep, just make them in advance and reheat when you are ready to serve.  If you like them chunkier, you can mash them up with a fork or potato masher.  For a smoother texture (my preference), a food processor works wonders.

Cooking with dried beans may be a no-brainer for some, but I only recently made the transition from canned for reasons outlined below.  A few readers have asked about how I prepare and cook with dried beans, so I thought a quick post might help explain the  process.  It’s super easy!

Why cook with dried beans?
There are many good reasons to ditch the cans and cook with dried beans.  For me, the biggest motivator was to reduce packaging waste.  Sure, cans are recyclable but it’s still better not to use them in the first place.  Also, dried beans are certainly more economical than canned.  In my grocery store, one can of beans costs $1.25-$1.85.  Comparatively, one pound of dried beans costs about $1.65, and yields the equivalent of  4-5 cans.  That’s a pretty significant difference, especially when you eat a lot of bean-centric meals as we do!  Finally, canned beans often contain a significant amount of sodium.  Preparing your own beans allows you to control the amount of salt you want to use.  So, more environmentally friendly, wallet friendly, and heart friendly.  What’s not to love?

Types of beans
Essentially all types of beans that are available in cans are also available dried, although the selection varies from store to store.  In my experience, the general method for prepping the beans is pretty much the same no matter what type of beans you are making.  (At least, all of the varieties I have tried have had identical instructions.)  Do keep in mind that there are a few varieties of beans that need to be boiled for longer periods such as kidney beans and soya beans for safety reasons.  Be sure to check the instructions on the specific type you purchase.  Some stores offer bulk bins which can be even more eco-friendly than a regular bag of dried beans if you bring your own bag or container to the store.

Step 1: Soak the beans
There are two soaking methods you can use: a quick soak or an overnight soak.  I pretty much always do a quick soak because it’s, well, quick, but either option works.  Keep in mind that every set of instructions ever says to pick over the beans to remove any stones or other non-bean matter.  I’ve done this maybe once, and I’ve never eaten a stone.  Haha!

Quick Soak
Combine the beans in a saucepan or stockpot with 6-8 cups of water per pound of beans.  Bring to a boil.  Let boil for two minutes.  Remove the pan from the heat, cover, and let stand for one hour.  Rinse and drain the beans.

Overnight Soak
Combine the beans in a large bowl or stockpot with 6-8 cups of cold water per pound of beans.  Let stand for 6-8 hours or overnight.  Rinse and drain the beans.

Step 2: Cook the beans
Once the beans are soaked, they need to be cooked so that they are soft and edible.  To do this, return the drained and rinsed beans to the pot and add 6 cups of water.  Bring the mixture to a boil, reduce the heat to a low simmer, and cook the beans just until tender, between 1-2 hours.  Be careful not to overcook the beans at this stage.  You want them to be tender enough that they can be eaten as they are, but not at all mushy so that they will still have good texture when added to other dishes.  I recommend checking a few with a fork around the one hour point and continuing to check every 15 minutes or so until they are cooked to your liking.

Step 3: Storing the beans
Once cooked, the beans will keep in the refrigerator for a couple of days.  Alternatively, they can be frozen (basically indefinitely – see this post about stocking the freezer for more info.)  I tend to cook large batches at once and then freeze them so that they are always on hand when I need them.  To thaw the frozen beans, I use one of two methods.  If I’ve done a good job planning ahead, I just move the container to the fridge and let the beans thaw there.  However, if I come home one night and decide I need to use frozen beans immediately, I just use the microwave to defrost them.  Both ways work fine.

How to substitute when recipes call for canned beans
Most recipes involving beans typically call for a specified number of cans simply because that is an easy measurement to provide.  However, you can easily substitute your cooked beans by using 1½ cups cooked beans per 1 (15 oz.) can indicated in a recipe.  You may also want to consider increasing the salt in the recipe slightly, since canned beans have more sodium and the recipe may have been designed with this in mind.  However, I prefer to err on the side of less salt and use the original amount in the recipe, adding more to taste only when needed.

I’ll be back tomorrow with a bean-centric recipe just in time for Cinco de Mayo.  In the meantime, here are a few more of my favorite recipes involving beans:  (I swear I do eat other types of beans, but clearly, my heart belongs to black beans)
Mexican Lasagna
Spicy Bean Burritos
Black Bean Burgers
Tortilla Black Bean Pie
Baked Southwestern Egg Rolls

French onion soup is one of my all-time favorite flavors, and that’s saying something coming from a soup lover such as myself.  Once spring weather starts to appear though, I’m not really in the mood for soups any more.  I’d rather be outside breathing in the fresh air than inside breathing in the smells from a simmering pot of soup, no matter how enticing they might be.  If there is one food I do love all year round, it’s grilled cheese.  I decided to combine the best of both worlds in this French onion grilled cheese.  It has all the flavors of French onion soup in the form of a fabulous gooey, cheesy sandwich.

The method here is fairly simple.  I caramelized some onions with a pinch of sugar, salt and pepper, and a little bit of fresh thyme.  I love to let them cook until they get to that magical point where they are perfectly tender, browned, and slightly sweet.  Near the end of cooking I added a splash of wine to enhance the flavor of the onions.  Then I piled these lovely onions onto baguette slices sandwiched with thinly sliced Gouda and Gruyere cheeses, and cooked them until they were oh so melty good.  Just before serving I rubbed the bread with the cut side of a clove of garlic for a nice finishing touch.

I have a vivid childhood memory of going to one of my mom’s favorite restaurants and ordering my old standby a grilled cheese sandwich.  It arrived with a slice of onion on top and I refused to touch my meal.  Oh, how times have changed.  All in all, this is a sophisticated spin on one of my childhood favorites, and at least in this instance, I’m glad to be a grown-up.

Note: This recipe was developed as part of my ongoing contribution to the Go Bold with Butter blog.  Head over to see my posts as well as those of the other awesome bloggers involved with the project!

Does that not sound amazing?  The moment I first laid eyes on this recipe, I knew we would be fast friends.  I made it.  We ate it.  And oh, did we love it.  For a die-hard chocolate lover such as myself, this is a perfect dessert option.  It’s part chocolate cake, part molten chocolate cake, part fudge brownie, and let’s not forget about the ganache on top.  And dear readers, I must apologize because I’ve known about this cake for longer than I care to admit and I haven’t shared it with you yet.  Go make it, enjoy, and we’ll call it even.

Aside from the chocolatey fabulousness, other good things to note about this cake are that it doesn’t require a ton of dishes and it can be made with what I consider fridge and pantry staples.  Since it is made in a bundt pan, it’s also less fussy than most layer cakes might be.  Just mix up the batter, bake the cake, top with ganache and you’ve got dessert.  It’s great in a pinch in case the other dessert you had been planning on was a huge fail – I know from experience.  But I have to say, no one was disappointed to have this as their back up dessert.  Not one little bit.

Things have been rather frenzied for me lately.  There has been a lot going on, at work, with family, life in general.  A week or two ago I finally had a moment to come up for air one glorious weekend day, and it was time for some much-needed kitchen therapy.  I wanted to make something with multiple components and multiple steps to because for me, it was mostly about enjoying the process.  This turned out to be the perfect choice.

This dish is involved, yes, but it was actually far less taxing than I might have imagined.  It was just the sort of lazy day in the kitchen that I love.  Make the bolognese, let it simmer, wandering back in every so often to stir and add more liquid.  Plenty of time to play with the kids and do a bit of cleaning.  Then, when the kids went down for their naps (at the same time, hooray!) I made the pasta dough, the bechamel sauce, and suddenly there was an assembled lasagna going into the oven.  (Pretty sure I missed a layer somehow in my excitement but for the record, the noodles taste pretty great dipped in excess béchamel as a pre-dinner snack.)

Be sure to use a wine worth drinking because its flavor will permeate the dish.  I used a red made by my father-in-law (a recumbent bicycling enthusiast) – how fun is that?   The end result is so very different from all other lasagnas I’ve tried before.  The paper-thin sheets of lasagna noodles, the hearty bolognese and the light, creamy béchamel come together in perfect harmony – none of the components overpowers the others.  It’s hard to find words to do justice to this meal.  If you appreciate the process of cooking, just make this yourself, have a wonderful time, and you’ll see that this is so worth it.  Be sure to invite friends over to help you eat it.  This sort of thing is best enjoyed with company.