beans in the crockpot

I will probably be excommunicated for saying this, but I don't love my crockpot. (gasp!) I've told Ryan several times that I'm probably the only Mormon who doesn't rave about how amazing her crockpot is. It's nice to have sometimes, especially if I want my roasts to be tender, but there are so many things that are inconvenient about it. You still have to get a bunch of dishes dirty as you prepare the food to put in, and even if you don't get a bunch of other dishes dirty you still have a huge, heavy pot (even the smallest ones are pretty big) that will only come clean after extensive soaking (yes, cooking spray does help a little bit). A dirty crockpot soaking in my sink makes me depressed. And living in an apartment, I tend to resent all the counter space the crockpot takes up. I guess those are my main complaints--having to clean burned food off and the size. Maybe in a few years when our family is bigger I will appreciate it a little more, because you really can make a lot of food in a crockpot. When you are only cooking for two, it doesn't make a lot of sense to make a crockpot full of food. Plus, it will be really convenient when I have little munchkins begging me to take them outside while dinner's cooking.

Anyway, yesterday I tried cooking a big batch of beans in my crockpot. I like to cook a lot of beans and then freeze them in meal-size portions so that if I decide one day that I want beans for dinner I don't have to spend all day cooking beans. Generally I thaw them out in a bowl of warm water. I used the quick-soak method because I didn't decide to cook beans until yesterday morning--I rinsed and sorted the beans, covered them with lots of water, brought it to a boil on the stove, and then turned off the burner. I just let them sit in there until I remembered them a couple of hours later. Then I drained them, rinsed them with my hands for a few minutes, and put them in the crockpot with lots of water. I added salt (1 tsp. per cup of dry beans) and oil (1 tbsp. per cup of dry beans). After about 6 hours they were tender and tasted very good! Next time I think I will cook twice as many beans because there was still plenty of room in the crockpot.

We'll see if I use the crockpot again to cook beans. I liked that I could cook a lot of beans--I do have a pretty big pot that I can use on the stove, but the crockpot would hold a lot more, and since it takes about the same amount of total time to cook 1 cup of beans as 4 cups of beans, I might as well cook lots of beans at once. The fact that I didn't have to babysit the food didn't make much of a difference to me since I was home all day anyway, but I guess if I wanted to cook beans one day but also wanted to go run some errands, it would be nice to be able to use the crock pot, because there's no way I would leave a pot of beans cooking on the stove while I was gone. On the other hand, it only takes an hour or two for the beans to cook in a pot on the stove. I liked that the crockpot wasn't that messy afterwards! There was only a small ring that was quite easy to wash off.

I used to be a little intimidated by beans, but after cooking them a few times it has become really easy.