Bean Baking Day ~ Putting Food By ~ What to do with the crumbs at the bottom of your cereal box

My largest crock pot will cook up 3 pounds of dry black beans nicely.  For my family, I bake them up with chopped onions, salt and pepper. 

Once these are baked (pre-soaked the night before) I cool them.  They are frozen for future meals.  Some may end up in tonight's dinner.  We are having a lot of fun searching out healthier meals using dry beans.  We recently used the last of the black beans I had in the freezer.

Yesterday, we made Pumpkin Black Bean Soup, and found it delicious.  It's got a spicy~sweet combo going on.  We will be keeping that recipe.  Although the recipe calls for canned tomatoes, I dumped in a quart sized bag of tomatoes I had frozen from last summer's garden.  I skipped the sour cream, and heavy cream.  I simply used 1 cup of organic milk.  For the chicken broth, I found organic, free range chicken broth on clearance for $1.49 for 4 cups (or you could make your own).

Here are other recipes, either from magazines such as Clean Eating, or from on-line that we revamped with garden goodies (simply swap out store bought with home grown, and use baked dry beans):

Chicken Black Bean and Avocado Wraps (Clean Eating, nutrition)

Mexican Pasta

Black Bean Pasta

Pumpkin Black Bean Soup

And don't forget you can add black beans to your egg dishes for breakfast too.  Yum!

It was perfect for a cold day, along with the banana bread I baked up.  Two loaves used up 6 rotten bananas, and my plan was to bake a third and freeze it.  However, my large family has snagged most of the bread to pack in school lunches tomorrow.

Yum!  We made with by cutting the flour in half and using half wholewheat from the flour mill, and 1/2 white flour.  I like the recipe we use for this, because it only requires 1 egg, and during winter our chickens lay less eggs.

Banana Bread (nuts optional)

3/4 cup wholewheat flour (preservative free)

3/4 cup all-purpose flour 

1/2 cup sugar, organic

2 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. baking soda 

1 cup of crushed leftover wheat breakfast cereal (optional, a way to use of the crumbs in the box)

1/3 cup chopped nuts

1 egg, farm fresh slightly beaten

1/4 canola oil or 1/4 cup organic applesauce

2 Tbsp. water

1 1/2 cups mashed bananas

1 tsp. vanilla

Preheat oven to 350°F.  Grease and flour a bread (loaf) pan, or spray the inside with a non-stick organic olive oil spray.  Stir together flours, sugar, baking powder, salt, baking soda, wheat cereal, and nuts.  Combine egg, oil, water, mashed banana and vanilla in a separate bowl.  Add all the dry ingredients at once to the wet, and stir only until moistened.  Pour into your bread pan, and bake from 50-55 minutes or until bread is tested done with a toothpick (pressed into center of bread, if it comes out clean it is done).  Let the bread cool in the pan about 15 minutes and then remove.  Cool completely before slicing.  

Note:  The wholewheat flour tends to dry the bread more so than the white, so by eliminating the extra crushed cereal, you may find it a bit softer.