Black Beans

do not have to come from a can.

And if you have freshly made roasted tomato salsa, they'll taste that much better.

It's really not much more work to make your own beans than it is to open a can. And while that may be convenient, it will never be as flavourful as beans that are slowly simmered in broth with carefully selected seasonings.

And by carefully selected, I mean yanked from the fridge.

Tinned beans are usually made with water and way too much salt. Making them yourself lets you control the sodium and boost up the flavour.

AKA Turn down the suck and turn up the good

Best Black Beans

What you need:

• about 3 cups of chicken broth
• about 1 cup of salsa (or, tomatoes, onions, chiles, etc to make one cup)
• about 1 c black beans
• about 1 lime

What you gotta do:

Put it all in the crock pot.

Broth, then salsa, then beans.

Cook it on low for 5-6 hours or on high for 3-4.

I never soak my beans first because I really want the colour that they give to the liquid. 

I squeeze in the lime juice at the end for a bit of brightness in the flavour.

Scoop out what you need to go on the side of your fabulous chicken dinner. Okay, it was just a bit of chicken breast chopped and sauteed with cayenne and lime juice, and a "salad" of lettuce with salsa and cheese on top, but hey! when you put it all together on the plate with the beans... it turns into a fabulous chicken dinner!

The rest of the beans... I left them in the crock pot, added some leftover rice and a bit of shredded chicken and called it soup!

You could also mash them up a bit for an awesome burrito filling.

Or, just eat them with a spoon.

I love beans. It's a little weird how much I do, but, well, look who's talking here.

What food do you love?

when life gives you tomatoes

make salsa!

Well, it wasn't life actually, it was my friend's dad.

We've had our first frost already, and for people who do the extreme DIY of food creation and grow their own, that meant emergency harvest of some veggies, and tucking the rest in under a blanket at night.

With no garden, not even a balcony for containers, I am always happy to accept donations of fresh home grown veggies. However, that was a lot of tomatoes, and they were getting pretty ripe, so I decided to use them all up at once. And since I've been craving heat like crazy lately...

Roasted Tomato Salsa

What you need:

• A lovely assortment of fresh ripe tomatoes ... I guess 2 pounds? Maybe 3?
• 5 giant jalapenos
• 1 onion
• 1 whole head of garlic (yes, a whole head)
• 1 lime (2 in the pic, I only used one)
• 1 bunch of cilantro
• oil
• salt

What you gotta do:

I opted to trim the stem parts off the tomatoes. You don't have to if you don't want to.

Preheat your oven to broil and move one of your oven racks up a level or two.

Chop the larger tomatoes in chunks (I did the big ones in quarters and the medium ones in half). Cut the onion into eighths. Cut the stems off the jalapenos, and cut them in half. If you really want to, take out the seeds and whatnot. Peel all the garlics.

Put the garlic, jalapeno, onion and tomatoes into a 9x13 roasting dish.

Drizzle on about 1 tbsp of oil, and toss the veggies in the oil until they're all nicely coated. Use your hands. It's okay. It's only food.

Put the veggies under the broiler.

If you have a decent oven, they should only take 15-20 minutes to be nice and roasty. After that much time, my tiny and apparently weak broiler had started to brown some of the skins, but the onions and jalapenos were still crispy.

I gave everything a stir and popped it back in the oven. It took another 20-25 minutes before everything was getting that nice browned roasty colour and smell.

Time to chop it.

Put the garlic, onion, and jalapenos (I just fished them out with a spoon) into your food processor.

Buzz this up for a few seconds. You don't want it too chopped, but if you don't do this step, by the time the onions and jalapenos are chopped, your tomatoes will be soup.

Drop the tomatoes on top of the pre-chopped stuff.

A few seconds is all it takes.

Now, we need something sour. Roasting the veggies, especially ones with super high sugar contents like onions and tomatoes, caramelizes the sugars and makes everything super sweet. That's where the lime juice comes in. You can use lemon juice or even white vinegar in this step.

This is where you chop and add the cilantro.

You're also going to want a bit of salt. I used about a teaspoon. The amount of salt you add is really dependent on how you plan on eating the salsa. I was planning on scooping it up with chips, so I used a chip as my taster.

If I'd salted the salsa by tasting it on its own, I would have ended up with a much saltier salsa. The salt on the chip makes a big difference.

I got quite a bit of salsa from that little portion of the emergency harvest.

The small containers went into the freezer since I'm not a canner. And a nice big bowl of it went onto my desk with some chips. And now there is cilantro on my statistics homework.

How did your garden grow?