Beans and Rice in Hard Times: Cooking Dried Beans
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Lynn cooks a full supper of dried pinto beans and a red Mexican-style rice, on purpose the cheapest way she can manage it - water instead of broth, a little leftover ham from the freezer. Along the way she shows the quick-soak method for the nights you forgot to soak the beans, which is the part most people come for.
What Lynn shows you
- "Look your beans" - before anything else she picks out broken beans and rocks, finds a stray black-eyed pea mixed in, and warns "you might could even find a grub worm or two."
- Her no-soak shortcut: bring the beans to a boil, cut the heat off, let them sit around 30 minutes, then rinse and cook. Without it she says they'd take roughly 30 to 45 minutes longer.
- Salt and black pepper go in at the end, not the beginning. She lets the beans cook down for about an hour to an hour and a half first.
- For the rice she rinses it, then toasts it in a little bacon grease to get some color on it before any liquid goes in.
- She uses chicken broth for the rice but says plainly that water works "if you're trying to do this on a real tight budget" - and once the lid goes on for the roughly 30-minute simmer, "do not open it."
These notes summarise the video — watch it for the full method.
