Beans

UPDATED at bottom

I'm on a mission to find more ways to eat beans that I like other than just refried. I was reading a book (A Feast Nearby) that talked about beans and it made me really want to love them. They are cheap, a good source of nutrition, and sound pretty easy to make. The only beans I ate growing up were refried on a burrito. My mom loves beans and puts kidney beans on her taco salad, loves bean soup, etc. Maybe it skipped a generation. I didn't even like green beans as a kid. Now I love fresh green beans and can even tolerate canned ones.
So... I bought 2 bags of beans at the store the other day. One bag of pinto and one bag of red beans. I want to try the red beans and rice recipe in that book and since I know I like refried beans, as does DD, I'm going to give those a try.

Today I started with the pinto beans. I was going to follow the recipe for refried beans in that book, but I don't think we'll eat enough and left overs really don't get used much (except to feed the animals) in our house.  So, I decided I'll can them, then we can have smaller portions. After looking at a few recipes online I went and did what I usually do... wing it!

I had a small bag of beans so using the measurement I found online I had enough for 4 pint jars (3/4c per jar). I found some recipes had  you soak the beans, others just threw them in the jars after rinsing, while my canning book said to boil them, let them sit for an hour, then boil again. I went in between and boiled them for about 15min while I prepared my jars and canner. I also saw different spice options. I just mixed up some garlic powder, onion powder, cumin, and salt in a bowl. No measuring, just dumping. Then I split the beans between my 4 jars, sprinkled some of my spice mixture over the top, filled with water from the boil, and processed them in my pressure canner for 1hr and 15 min (since I am at a high altitude I did this at 15lbs but those in lower altitudes should do it at 10).

They are still ticking away in the kitchen so I can't give you an update on how they turned out but maybe we'll have burritos for dinner tonight!
I'll update this thread when we've tried them.

UPDATE: we had burritos that night. The beans turned out great. Only negative was my new potato masher broke the very first time I used it. The beans lost a lot of their water in the canner but it turned out to be the perfect amount when they were mashed.

I also found the blogger app so it is much easier to add my pics to the post. Yeah!