Me and My Brilliant Ideas

Ok, try not to laugh too hard while you read this ...

I eat a lot of beans.  And I recently read a blog entry over on "A Year of Crockpotting" about cooking dried beans and freezing them and saving $$$ on canned beans.  What a great idea!  At the end of the post she said she wished she'd cooked more than just one 1lb bag of black beans so she could have more on hand in the freezer.  So that's what I did.  Got a few bags so I could do them all at once. 

But of course, I eat more than just black beans, so I bought some great northern beans, Michigan red beans and pinto beans.  And who needs just a mere one pound of beans... gimme those big 2lb bags.  Maybe two of those 2lb bags.  

Ok, let's do the math.  Four pounds of four different kinds of beans equal sixteen pounds of beans.  I have two big crockpots, so figured I'd do them in batches.  I soaked them all last night before bed and woke up this morning to a surprise.  

It quickly became obvious that the crockpots were too small for the expanded beans.  I only had one big pan that could deal with one type of beans.  I pulled out the big roasting pan and divided another type between that and a normal sized soup pan.  And this leaves me with two crockpots of soaked beans, waiting for the pans to finish cooking the first two types of beans so the second two types can get cooking.  

I'm going to have enough beans to last me a lifetime.  Or else I'm going to be eating a whole lot of chili, ham and bean soup, white chicken chili, tortilla soup and bean salad.  Sounds like I'll be pulling out cookbooks and surfing my favorite cooking websites to find some uses for all these beans!

EDITED TO ADD:  After all was said and done, I packaged the beans up into ziploc baggies with 2 cups of beans per bag.  I now have 40 bags of beans to eat!

Ok, you can stop laughing now!

~Pam