Homemade Ready

I just love beans, I really do. They are a good source of plant-based protein, with the added bonuses of being tasty and economical. While I always keep beans on hand in my pantry in both canned and dried versions, my favorite approach to cooking with beans is to cook dried beans in big batches, then store them in smaller, convenient portions in my freezer.  I find this to be a cheap and easy way to have quick access to beans for use in soups, stews, chili, side dishes, salads, and for stretching out the ground meat in recipes. The thing I wonder, though, is how did cooking dried beans get to be such a controversial and (unnecessarily) complicated subject? Although grannies and cowboy cooks have been cooking and eating beans as a staple food for many long years, this practice has become something that now seems to intimidate many home cooks.  It’s understandable why this is, however, when you read the many conflicting articles out there about the hows and whys of cook...

Tomato paste is an essential part of my pantry storage. It gives great, concentrated tomato flavor to so many recipes, but only takes up only a little bit of space on the shelf. The down side of tomato paste, of course, is the waste. It’s only very rarely that I will use an entire six-ounce can of tomato paste in one recipe (mainly spaghetti sauce and big pots of chili). Of course, you can buy one of those four or five-ounce tubes of tomato paste, store it in the fridge, and use a tablespoon or two here and there. This just isn’t a solution that appeals much to me. I just can’t feel good about buying those little tubes of paste because the cost per ounce is so much higher than the cans. At Target, for example, a 4.5-ounce tube of Amore Tomato Paste is $2.87, or $0.63 per ounce. By comparison, a 6-ounce can of Hunt’s Tomato Paste is $0.64, or roughly $0.10 per ounce. That is a huge difference in price! It’s a convenience I’m just not willing to pay for. (Note, if you want eve...