wait...you mean i didn't cook them? or how to cook dry beans

disclaimer: there is a very long, self-depricating story before i share with you how i cooked my dried beans. feel free to skip all the way to the bottom to find that. i promise, my feelings won't be hurt if you don't read my story!

oh y'all.

you know how i enjoy a good bit of self-deprication, right? get ready.

i've been on a weird kind of a kick this summer. go natural, save some dollars. this has been brought about by my newfound (within the last year) complete and total lack of dollars. when i got accepted to UF and was granted a teaching assistantship, i thought i had hit the jackpot. and honestly, i kind of did. i'm getting paid to get a master's degree. doctors and lawyers will find themselves with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt when they're done, and i'll be sittin' pretty on my leftover five bucks. the thing is, though, i have never had a job and made so little money in my life. again - definitely not complaining, super-grateful for where i am and what i've got - but it's resulted in a resetting of everything. i used to be at the thrift store looking for treasures once a week - now it's maybe once a month, and even then, i get a little nervous. gone are the days of cruising down to wally world to dig through the $5 movie bin.

fortunately, i didn't have to make a huge change from eating out all the time to learning to cook and eating at home. i cut back on the pizza delivery (completely) and the chinese takeout (maybe once every two months), but that really hasn't been such a big deal. also, i don't know whether or not y'all are aware, but it's difficult (not impossible, i know) to find meals for one. or two, even, so i've taken to cooking a whole whole bunch on sunday afternoon and not entering my kitchen for another two weeks except to pull something out of the fridge and nuke it. i don't want to bore y'all with all the details of this particular journey, so let me get to the point: i've stopped (for about a week - i may go back, this may prove to be too much work) using beans out of the can. because oh. my. goodness. it's like half as expensive to just buy them dry and cook them! and i know beans are cheap to begin with, but when you're already on a budget and a large portion of your meal planning consists of beans of one variety or another, reducing that by half is huge.

here's what happened: one day i bought some dry lentils. honestly, i only bought them dry because i couldn't find them in the can and the girl at publix was not helpful. (surprise! i hate publix. probably only feel as strongly as i do because of the Texas-shaped hole left in my heart by the absence of HEB.) so i come home with my lentils, and i read the package, and it says you don't have to soak them, just put 'em in the pot and cook away. awesome. so i got them cooked. by boiling and simmering in plain water. and they tasted like mushy cardboard. it was okay, though, because i was going to roast them with lots of other spices. which i did. and they were yummy, if not kind of a lot of work and hard to pick up and get in your hand all at once because when you roast an already tiny lentil, it shrivels up to the size of ... i don't know. i can't even think of an analogy here. they're hard to eat that way.

cut to a couple days later when i'm making this delicious spicy chickpea and ground beef (turkey in my house, because it's healthier and cheaper) recipe from kalyn's kitchen. shout-out to kalyn's kitchen for keeping me fed for the last year. the woman is amazing. the recipe calls for (obviously) lots of chickpeas. well. only two cans. but i double it, so it calls for four. what can i say? i love to eat. also, it uses the...juice(?) out of the chickpea cans. i think this is an important detail to the rest of the story. here i go with my dried chickpeas. it's something like four in the afternoon, and i'm only just getting started, so i'm not about to put these chickpeas in a pot and let them sit all. night. long. i remember having read something about a "quick soak" method, so off to the trusty google i go. and there it is! quick-soak your chickpeas, and be ready to go in just over an hour! this was certainly for me. cliffs-notes version - boil for five minutes, let them sit in the hot water off the heat for an hour. so i do it. they don't get as soft as i think they should, so i boil them a little bit again and let them sit some more. softer still. i think i should give it one more go, so i do. then we're ready to make dinner! i follow my recipe, just like always (which means i mostly follow my recipe), and instead of putting the canned chickpea juice, i put in some homemade chicken stock. the recipe does say that if your chickpeas didn't give you enough juice you can add chicken stock. i just took it a step further. everything else is just like normal. i get done. i take a bite. hmm. this is not good. i mean, it's okay, but the chickpeas have kind of ... zero flavor. [at this point in the writing of this post, i had to get up and go get my giant cup of coffee to be able to push through telling y'all the rest of this horrible story. this is the giant cup.

]

not thinking much of it, i blame this flavorlessness on my homemade chicken stock. they're also not quite as soft as when i used the canned version, but i guess that's okay. i mean, it's not like i'm chewing rocks or anything.

a little while later, my sweet momma calls, in what my roommate erroneously refers to as our "daily conversation." (let's be real. there are at least two on any given day, and likely three. so maybe it was our "afternoon conversation." that cord is not cut now, and i doubt it ever will be, and i'm mostly okay with that.) i start telling her about the Great Chickpea Adventure and how it didn't turn out so well. i started with the end of the story, the part where it didn't turn out so well. and like any good detective, momma works backwards to figure out where it all went wrong. and then she says, "wait. you didn't cook them?!" i'm sitting here thinking, "what do you mean, 'i didn't cook them?' i put them in the water, i boiled them, and then i cooked them with the dinner. totally cooked them."

NOPE. DID NOT COOK THE CHICKPEAS, AND I AM A TOTAL IDIOT.

we had a good laugh. such a good laugh, in fact, my roommate came out of his room into the living room to see what all the fuss was about. i didn't tell him. and i let him eat half of the raw chickpea meals. before y'all get mad and tell me how horrible i am, remember that i ate the other half, and i actually KNEW they weren't cooked. the story does have kind of a happy ending, though, in that i had a do-over and actually cooked the chickpeas the second time. with spices and seasonings, so they would have some flavor. it turned out delicious. deliciously. whatever.

so! here's what i learned about cooking chickpeas: it's a two-step process (as seen in the five steps listed below), and they do not come out of the ground (is that even where they come from?) with any of their own flavor. i apologize to everyone who already knew this and has sat through this atrocity of a cooking experience only to find out that i'm a complete doofus. and now i will reward you with my summary of how to cook chickpeas:

step 1: look for rocks and other debris in your beans. remove them. this is the most boring of all the steps. even if you overnight soak.

step 2: there are choices here. they are:

• option a: soak them overnight (covered) in a large pot of water. way more water than chickpeas.
• option b: quick soak them - large pot of lots of water, chickpeas. boil for about 5 minutes, turn off the heat, let them sit for about an hour in their hot tub.

step 2: drain and rinse them.

step 3: put them back in the pot with a lot of water. several more inches of water than there are inches of chickpeas. at this point, add things to (and this is super-important) FLAVOR THE CHICKPEAS. in all my googling, i never found a list of things you should add, so i kind of made it up. i know i put in

• a couple bay leaves
• some salt
• some pepper
• some garlic powder (i didn't have any actual cloves)
• some onion powder (i didn't have any actual onions)
• some chipotle powder (because i did read that this would give it a "nice smoky flavor without adding heat" [not that i would have minded the heat]. i don't remember where i read that, so if you're the person who wrote it and you've happened to stumble across this mess, i'm sorry i coudn't cite you properly. i say again: chipotle powder was not my idea. but it was a great one.)
• some cumin (because chipotle powder went in the actual recipe for the ground beef & chickpeas, and so did cumin, i figured it wouldn't hurt to throw some in.)

i think i probably threw in a couple other things, because why not, but i don't remember what they were.

step 4: bring chickpeas to a boil with all the yummy stuff you threw in. boil about five minutes, then reduce heat and simmer for an hour to an hour and a half, depending on how mushy you want your beans. i like mine mushy. i might have pushed past the hour and a half.

step 5: drain the beans. i saved a little of this bean-water-juice to mix with my chicken stock for the aforementioned recipe, but if you're not doing this, i say throw it all out.

that's it! also, you can freeze them if you cooked more than you need. most things i read recommend drying them off as best you can and freezing them in a single layer (like in a ziploc baggie or something) so they don't clump/stick together, but i saw one suggestion i thought was genius to put them on some parchment paper on a cookie sheet, then pop that in the freezer for half an hour so they start to get frozen, then put however many you want in a ziploc baggie and since they're already partly frozen, they won't stick to each other. again. that wasn't my idea, and i don't remember where i read it. i can't tell you how the freezing worked out because i used all my chickpeas right away. the recipe turned out about a zillion times better than the time i didn't cook the chickpeas, though.

additionally, i'm fairly certain this method works for all dried beans, but i'm not 100% positive. i did it with black beans last night. turned out pretty well.

how do you cook your dried beans? what do you flavor them with? have you ever failed to cook them? don't hang your head in shame; it happens to the best of us!

♡whit