Pressure Cooking

 I brought home Karsyn and Mason man's costumes to do some resizing for Halloween. How cute are they going to be as Dorthy and the Lion from "The Wizard of Oz". Mason loves playing in his Lion costume, lots of roars and pretend bites as he attacks us all.

 This weeks $100.00 for groceries is still siting in my zippy wallet. So far I have had zero spending for food. $70.00 was moved over to the mason jar savings from last week. I still haven't decided what to use the savings for. I will continue to dream :)

 Since none of the grands were around today I figured it was the perfect opportunity to try out my new pressure cooker. On the menu tonight was  Black Bean soup (just like Panara bread) along with artisan bread. Rather than use canned black beans I wanted to use dry black beans. The ratio of dry beans to cooked beans seemed to be all over the place. I decided to cook up 3 cups of dry beans not knowing how many cooked cups I would have in the end.

I didn't pre soak the beans, just checked them over for any bad beans, gave them a quick wash then threw them in with 8 cups of water. After cooking the beans for 45 minutes I ended up with 8 cups of cooked beans. Everything I have read/seen so far suggests to pour our the extra liquid then rinse the beans after they have cooked to cut down on indigestion (gas).  Here is a really good video on cooking beans

 Since I wasn't sure how freshly cooked dry beans would work in my recipe I used 2 cans of store bought beans along with 4 cups of the dry beans. Not sure what to make of this but the fresh cooked beans on the top of this photo are much darker than the canned beans on the bottom of the dish. Gonna have to google for this info.

The Bean Soup recipe makes a whole lot more soup than I care to eat. I split the pot with myself,  DD#1, and a friend. Instead of two large loaves of artisan bread I divided the dough into 3 loaves, one for each of our homes. Oh ya, and chocolate chip cookies. Our temp tonight  is 48 degrees with the wind chill, that's pretty darn cold for this time of the year, the soup and bread really hit the spot.

Do you ever get to the end of the day and wonder where the heck did that day go? I was working on something or other all day starting at 6:00AM but there doesn't seem much to show for it. I have a tiny bit of sewing I want to finish up tonight but...I'm not sure I will get back off the sofa!

All right let me share with you how the new pressure cooker worked out for me. Everything was simple as could be, but I did have fears the lid would blow off!! I stayed in the kitchen cleaning the fridge and pantry while the beans were cooking just to see what was going on. The one thing I will do different next time is use the cooker on my open counter. When I released the steam after the beans were done it made a heck of a mess on the cabinets above the cooker. There was steam dripping from 3 upper cabinets :( . The clean up was very easy unlike the crock pot sometimes!!

Since I used 1/2 canned beans in the soup recipe that leaves 4 extra cups of cooked dry black beans in the fridge. Kara and I are going to use some of them to make brownies tomorrow, check out this video on the how to substitute beans for oil. Some of the beans I will freeze to use at a later date, will see how that works out. Maybe a chocolate cake using black beans, could work for Sunday dinner this week.

I'm looking forward to trying a few new recipe's using the pressure cooker in the near future. I sure will come in handy making mash potato's for the whole family!!