PINTO BEANS IN THE CROCK POT

I recently have been asked for some vegetarian recipes for the crock pot. Now I am not vegetarian so I had to do some searching because I wanted them without any chicken or beef broth added. I found plenty of recipes with most of them calling for beans as a replacement for the meat. So the problem is I like beans but not canned beans so I decided to make a pot of pinto beans so that I would have fresh beans for my recipe. I have always soaked my beans overnight and cooked them on the stove with a leftover ham bone but that’s not vegetarian. So I decide just to cook them in the crock pot with seasonings and no meat. My beans turned out wonderful. Very tender and tasty and I didn't even have soak them first. Now when you make a pot of beans you end up with a lot of them so I had some for lunch and then divided up the rest of them in several containers and put them in the freezer to use in recipes later. We had some friends over swimming on Saturday and I have a little friend that loves refried beans on flour tortillas otherwise known as a bean burrito. So I got out one of my containers of beans and put it in a little food processor I had and added some of the juice, some seasoning and pureed it. Homemade refried beans! I think she liked them a lot she ate almost three burritos. I tasted a bite of them with some melted cheese and thought how good these are! They are a lot healthier than restaurant beans because I added bean juice instead of lard and tasted a lot better than canned beans because there were no preservatives added. So here is the first of my vegetarian recipes. Next week I will be trying a cornbread and bean casserole with some of my homemade pinto beans. 

INGREDIENTS:

3 cups of dry pinto beans

1 chopped onion

5 tsp. of salt

4 tsp. of pepper

1 tsp. of cumin

4 cloves of garlic minced

9 cups of water

DIRECTIONS:

Rinse the beans. Then place all the ingredients in the crock pot, cover and cook on low for 8 hours. To make refried beans I used a slotted spoon and put several cups of beans in the food processor. Added some of the liquid and pureed it. Then transferred it to a bowl, sprinkled some cheese on it and heated it in the microwave for some delicious refried beans that can be served with crock pot fajitas or on flour tortillas as burritos.