Yes, You Can--Beans!

Home-canned beans from Potenza Organic farms. Yum!

One of my kids' favorite lunches is quesadillas or chips served with a dip made of salsa mixed with black beans. I like to use the local organic beans in my pantry, but beans do take time to cook, even in the pressure cooker, and the quesadilla lunch is one I like to make on the fly. Then one day I spoke to my friend Ellen at Regional Access, a local-foods distributor. Ellen has been buying local organic beans and canning them herself. (Did you know you could do that? I didn't know you could do that.) What a great idea! You can have local, organic beans for less than the cost of buying canned beans, and what a convenience. It takes the same amount of time as just cooking beans!

All you need is a pressure cooker large enough to hold canning jars, and, of course, beans. (If you don't have a pressure cooker, consider buying one. They save time and energy. It will expand your repertoire tremendously.) Any pressure cooker large enough to hold jars will work. Mine is a 5-quart pressure cooker, and it holds pint jars or smaller. Most new pressure cookers come with a round, flat metal insert you put in the cooker to hold the jars up off the bottom.

Dip made from beans and salsa, plus organic corn chips. Apples, cookies and grape gelatin not pictured.

If you have never canned, it would be a good idea to look up more information about proper procedure. I can't go into that here. It is pretty easy, though, and satisfying. To pressure-can beans, soak the beans overnight, then cook them for about 1/2 an hour,  to make sure they are heated through. (I won't get into the "salt-or-no-salt" debate--just do as you see fit.) Pack the hot beans into the hot jars, put the jars in the pressure cooker, then process at 10psi for 60 minutes for pint jars. My jars held one cup each--that's half a pint--but I went ahead and cooked them for the full hour anyway, just to make sure the beans were soft enough. They came out perfect! It's great because you don't have to worry about the beans on the bottom of the pot sticking or burning--they all cook evenly and perfectly. Use what you need at the moment and let the other jars cool so you can put them away for another day--your "leftovers" are already packed and ready.