Pole Beans!!

[Courtney]

Help.... does anyone have any good recipes for all the pole beans drying in my garden! I've never used dried pole beans before only freezing and canning them. I just have so many this year! Do you use them as you would any other dried bean? I know they are good in soups but my husband doesn't care for soup.....any ideas?

[sbemt456]

Courtney you can use the little white ones in baked beans from scratch. If they are brown maybe make chili beans for your chili. Cook the brown ones for refried beans. All this is gonna take a lot of shelling beans. If that sounds like a lot of work just put them in an empty feed bag or coffee sack and beat them with a stick or stomp on them to hull them out and then you can separate the beans from the dried pods. This is my lazy method. To heck with shelling each individual bean pod. Makes for sore little fingers. Hope this gives ya a few ideas.
Oh and you can save some for next year seed.

stella

[Courtney]

Thank you Stella I didnt even think about using them in chili. I froze and canned about ten gallons of chili this summer among other things, my tomatoes went wild this year! I'll put the pods in a sack and let my five and three year old daughters have it! Thanks again.

[sbemt456]

Courtney you might google for a recipe for canned chili beans. I made mine with pinto beans, I had soaked waaaaay too many to can just pinto bean soup. I think I added chili powder, onion and dont remember what else. I also used dried beans to make baked beans to can. You would be processing them for 90 minutes any way, I used our favorite made from scratch baked bean recipe. They all turned out really good.
Bet the kids did enjoy that task, all the time thinking they were all of a sudden allowed to do the forbidden. At that age ya might want to watch where ya sit the grocery bags.

Have a great day.

stella

[CarolAnn]

I've got a good sweet-sour bean recipe, and you can use a variety of shell beans, including limas, navy beans, butter beans, whatever you have - which makes it pretty, or just one kind - and it tastes so good you won't mind if it doesn't have all the different kinds.

Cook the beans until tender - how long that is you'll soon learn to judge, as well as how much water to cook them in. I make the sauce from 1/2C brown sugar, 1/2 cider vinegar, 1 chopped onion, a bit of dry mustard, some celery seed, crushed right before I use it, a dash of liquid smoke and salt and pepper to taste.

The traditional way to make this is like German potato salad, only using beans rather than cooked potatoes: you fry 6 pieces of bacon crisp and set aside. Drain out most of the bacon fat, but leave enough to brown the chopped onion. Into this, add the other ingredients and stir. Add about 1 TBSP of corn starch to thicken it. (I don't measure - so I'm guessing here!) Pour over the cooked beans, the crumbled bacon and heat through.

If I have a roast or a chicken in the oven, I put this bean dish in for the last 30-45 minutes.

The key is to use equal parts of sweet and sour. If you want to use honey and lemon juice, that works well too, but you use less honey because it's twice as sweet as sugar. It also gives the dish a lighter taste - I don't know how to describe it, but it's good! (You also need to taste it as you go to make sure you have the sweet-sour balanced.)

[Courtney]

Thank you both for the great ideas. That sweet-sour bean dish sounds delicious i'll be making that very soon. Have a great weekend. C.