Summer Stockpiling - Plus Making Dried Beans in a Crockpot Tutorial

When I moved away from home, I realized there are a few of basic grocery items that I'm not used to buying. My family has a definite "homemade" mentality, and when I was growing up, pizzas and lasagnas weren't pulled out of the freezer or ordered; they were made from scratch. Store-bought bread was an oddity in our house and we never, ever bought jarred spaghetti sauce. It was a sad day indeed if we ran out of homemade jam and had to buy a jar of strawberry preserves, or heavens help us, grape jelly. To this day, grape jelly still tastes like sadness to me.

Now that I'm on my own, I find I also lean towards making things from scratch. It's cheaper. It tastes better. It's more satisfying. And let's be honest, when I work from home like I do the majority of the year, it's pretty easy for me to live a "made from scratch" life.

When I'm home all day, I just don't find it very time consuming to make things from scratch. Homemade bread may require 3+ hours of time, but it doesn't require my undivided attention that whole time. It's easy enough to mix up the dough and leave it to rise to rise while I go do something else, then return to shape loaves, leave again to do whatever, pop the bread in the oven and go do something else while the bread bakes. If I'm smart about it, I can get a good 2 hours of work done during the whole bread baking process. I make my marinara sauce by throwing all the ingredients in a crockpot and let it burble away for 4-5 hours for a total hands-on time of 30 minutes. In fact, I use the crockpot as shortcut for lots of "made from scratch" stuff.

If I'm making this all sound like a snap, let me assure you that it all goes to hell in a hand basket when summer comes around. By mid-August, between working full time and berry picking, I pretty much give up on making things from scratch and I'm buying bread and spaghetti sauce along with everyone else. So every spring I come up with this great idea that I'm actually going stockpile the ingredients I like to make myself in the freezer and have enough to last through the busy summer season.  Honestly, I've never managed to pull this off, but I persist in thinking it's a really good idea.

One ingredient I prefer to prepare at home are beans. It's about half as expensive to make your own cooked beans from dried beans, rather buying cooked and canned beans. You can also better control how much sodium's in your bean recipes by making your own beans. And you can cook up large batches, which saves me the trouble of having to buy canned beans nearly every week. (We eat a lot of beans.)

The other day we were running low on frozen beans, so I cooked up a batch each of kidney, pinto, and garbanzo beans over the course of three days. Here's a pictorial guide to the last batch, the garbanzos.

Take your bag of approximately 3-4 pounds of garbanzos (I purchase my dried beans at the local co-op), dump into a colander and rinse with cold water. Pick through the beans and discard any rocks or broken beans. Dump the beans into your crockpot and cover with about four inches of cold water. Cover and place in the fridge overnight. 

The next morning your beans will have doubled in size. Dump them into a colander, than back into the crockpot and cover with fresh cold water. I usually have the water covering the beans by about an inch at this point.

 

Turn your crockpot on high and walk away. I put an old towel around the base of the crockpot to soak up the water that will inevitably boil over. Be warned, bean water does not smell great, so you'll want to wash that towel that in timely manner. (Lesson learned.)

Check on your beans after about 4 hours. I find it takes most beans between 4-5 hours to reach desired tenderness using this method. It's okay to turn off the crockpot a little before the beans are as tender as you'd like. Like pasta, the beans will cook as they cool in the colander.

Pour into a colander (or two) and cool. Divvy up into 1 3/4 cup portions in freezer bags. Throw in the freezer. Now you have bagged and frozen equivalents of canned beans for half the price!

You can thaw out the beans in the fridge before you use them, but honestly, I'm never that organized and usually just throw them in frozen into whatever recipe I'm making and increase the cooking time a bit. Remember, these aren't salted, so you may have to add extra salt to your recipe.

Now I've got a good summer stockpile of beans, but there's plenty of bread baking and sauce making if I'm really going to make it through the summer . . .

 

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Settling In For the Winter

The old Yodel stove

Summer went out like a candle this year and the last three weeks have been drizzly and cold. Today marks the autumnal equinox, as if we need one more reminder that winter just isn't getting farther away. Lately, as we hurry to slop paint on the new shed before it gets too cold, we keep sneaking glances at the wood pile, wondering if it'll be enough to last through an "almost guaranteed to be" five month winter.

It's hard to tell what the winter will truly bring, although we certainly like to devote a fair amount of time speculating on what the winter months might bring. After all, last year's wimpy winter must mean "we're due."  And haven't the fuzzy caterpillars seemed especially fuzzy? As much as I try to avoid the Farmer's Almanac approach to weather predictions, I can't help but remember that the infamous 1991 Halloween Blizzard followed a summer so beastly and muggy that my brother and I spent most of it playing in the unfinished basement. That summer, the frosting on my brother's mid-July birthday cake slid down the sides as he blew out the candles. What does that meltingly awful summer weather sound like? Oh yeah, this summer . . .

But if the ol' north wind decides to dump two - four feet of snow on us this October 31st, we'll be ready. Well, kind of.  (Still haven't quite wrapped my mind around the fact that I'll be living 55 miles away from the nearest grocery store this winter.)  But we do have a brand spankin' new wood stove that will help us burn through that wood pile just a little slower and allows us to use a renewable, carbon neutral energy source for most of our heating this winter.

This is the new Lopi Endeavor stove we bought last 'weekend.' We can fit a ton more wood inside the burn box  and the stove allows us to burn each piece of wood much more efficiently instead of sending most of the firewood's energy up the chimney like that last stove did. Since I'll be working from home all winter, I'm rather fond of the idea of not having to spend most of day tending the fire. After all, there's a reason why Hestia (the Greek goddess of the hearth) always gets forgotten . . . .

Andy warms himself in front of the stove

Once we got the stove home, Andy spent most of the following two days not talking to me. So absorbed in the fitting of pipes and cutting of holes in ceilings and roofs was he that he hardly even remembered to eat until the first fire was crackling in the stove. Now he's taken to sitting on the floor by the stove and smiling at it. He's also taken to talking to me again, although a fair bit of the conversation still centers around the awesomeness of the stove.    

They say "home is where the heart is." But in northern Minnesota, it might be more apt to say "home is where the hearth is." Tonight the stove sends out a warm orb through the cabin, taking the chill off this fall night. Will it be enough to keep us cozy and warm this January? Only time will tell.

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Maybe I Don't Get It

We got rain today. A lot of rain. The good soaking kind that forces me to drive to work and which in turn drives people to a museum in droves. For most people the rain was a mild inconvenience. For others, the precipitation came as a relief. “We need the rain so badly,” the latter group said all day. “The fire danger was so high!”

Maybe I don’t get it. And knowing me, that’s probably the case, so let me preface this by saying that I don't mean to be insensitive. I just sometimes wonder what all the worry's about.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s been dry around here. The water level in the lake is worryingly low. And frankly the wildfires of 2007 just weren’t quite long enough ago for most people around here.

I didn’t experience the Ham Lake Fire of 2007 first hand. I wasn’t evacuated from my home for 12 days. Although I have plenty of fire memories, I haven’t had any personally traumatic fire experiences.

When it’s dry outside, I notice, kind of like noticing that it’s raining or that the sky is blue. But it’s rare that the dryness of the environment seems truly ominous to me. In fact, the last time the world seems poised for wildfire was the spring of 2007, when my walks through the woods behind my college campus seemed reminiscent of walking through a tinder box. Low and behold, less than a week after a rather creepily crackly and dry walk through woods, the Ham Lake Fire started 100 miles away from where I’d hiked.

When I was in college, I interviewed Senator Mark Dayton (yes, the very same Senator Dayton running for Minnesota Governor) for an article in weekly student newspaper. I asked him the typical college newspaper questions: what did he think about job prospects, health insurance, etc. To one my questions, he responded, “Plan for your future, but don’t worry about it.”

Up here in the woods, we all have sprinkler systems installed on our property and cabins. We try to be environmentally responsible. We hope people will heed the words of Smokey Bear and do their best to prevent wildfires.

And that’s pretty much all we can do. Worrying about the rain won’t make it rain. We simply have to be ready for what could happen, but we can’t devote all of today to worrying about what might happen.

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No Fooling

I’ve never cared for April Fool’s Day. The whole concept of the day has always seemed a bit misguided. I’m not sure where the fun is in taking advantage of people. And doesn’t corporate America do that every day anyway? Do we really need a special day set aside for it each year?

There’s no time for fooling around here. Tomorrow morning the train leaves the station and won’t return for nearly two weeks. Because I have an out of town work appointment tomorrow afternoon, we don’t have the luxury of being able to leave whenever we’re ready to go tomorrow. Everything needs to be pretty set to go this evening, although we don’t actually fly anywhere until Saturday.

Right now everything’s kind of frantic hum of trying to think of everything I need to pack, making sure all the stinky garbage is out of the house and wondering when the best time would be to do that finally load of dishes. I’ve also got to devote some time to get the toiletry bag in order. Petty, I know, but with all the liquids needing to be in their own baggy, I need to sort through it. On top of the buzz of preparations, it’s starting to sink in that I’m going to be gone for a significant chunk of time. I sure hope there isn’t anything crucial I’ve forgotten to do.

I got a good start on a project today. I’m really excited about the progress I made yet am simultaneously overwhelmed because I realized the progress I made today is just the beginning of a very large project. Seems like a good time to go on vacation. I’ll be happy when I get back that I got this work done ahead of time.

Today the temps have been close to 70 degrees. The robins are out in full force and the lake is looking quite black. The goldfinches have been hanging out at the feeder for the last week or so.

Next time I talk, it’ll be from the road. Happy April everyone!

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