From Scratch

While I was helping my younger daughter finish up her sixth-grade material for her correspondence school, we had to make our own refried beans for a project/assignment on the Aztecs. I'd never made refried beans before--they were always something that came out of a can. But make them we did, and the corn tortillas, too. I used up the last of our black beans, and they were surprisingly good.

Now we've done it again, and this time it wasn't for an assignment. I cooked some Idaho-grown pink beans in the smaller slow cooker. Then I mashed them up like I did the black beans and fried them in a pan with a little extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO). We made them into burritos using thin-sliced and chopped Idaho ham and shredded Idaho cheddar, and commercial whole-wheat tortillas made without saturated fat, trans fat, or hydrogenated oils. So everything but the tortillas and EVOO qualified as local.

I think the thing that surprised me the most (after the taste, which was out-of-this-world delicious) was how easy it really was to make the refried beans. At this point, I don't know whether it was actually cheaper to make our own or buy the cans, since I haven't done the math yet. But it was fun and delicious, and this way the beans were local. That, and they had no additives to speak of. No preservatives, no salt, and no spices that the Huz is allergic to. Just beans, water, and EVOO. Those burritos were easily twice as good as anything we've purchased at any of the fast-food Tex-Mex chain restaurants. It was such a wonderful change from bean soup. We all liked them so much we couldn't stop eating them...until we ran out of tortillas, anyway.