A New Twist on Pork & Beans

I'm letting my kid eat fruit, carby veggies and legumes even though otherwise she is eating "with me" on my plan. We also eat small (underline small) amounts of breadishes, such as corn tortillas the last few nights. (Which got me wondering if I could come up with some variant that mixed corn meal with flax seed meal and almond flour for a sort of corny firm crepe. I never did get back to The Great Crepe Experiment and I really should.)

So I dumped a pound of pinto beans into the crockpot -- off, not heated -- and left 'em there overnight. Next morning, dumped off the soakwater, rinsed a big chunk of pork loin and tossed it on top of them, fat side up. I was too lazy to chop it into chunks and was hoping maybe it'd be ok.

I found this "pinto bean seasoning" (for refried beans) in the mexican section at walmart, and I put a bunch of that and nature's seasoning on it all, filled the water up to nearly the top of the meat, put the lid on, turned it on high, and ignored it for 11 hours. Which is really long but I've found that pork loin can cook twice as long as most stuff and it just ends up super tender and yummy instead of overcooked (it's less tender if cooked as long as I'd cook, say, roast beef). I know the seasoning stuff has carbs, but not so many per the usage/serving that I'm too worried about it.

I didn't have to chop up the pork like for chili verde which was such a relief. I didn't have to add bacon like I would for pork & beans. The flavor result was incredibly good and the kid and I had it for an afterschool snack. And the flavor, being more of the pinto bean mexican seasoning than the pork and beans type seasoning (similar but not quite the same), was perfect: we tore it up with a fork and nuked some, and dumped it into tacos for dinner. Pork tacos! It was great! I could have fried the beans for her but she loved the tacos with some beans in them too.

So counting rinsing the beans, soaking them, dumping off the water, adding the pork, the seasoning, and more water, I think the meal took me a total of about, oh, 7 minutes all total, and it gave us two good sized meals, a bunch of meat for one of the kitties, and enough to have another meal between us as well. Which although the pork isn't super cheap (it's loin, not tenderloin, so not too bad), the beans are, and that many meals out of 'em for two people makes it a great price. The time investment doesn't count the 11 hours during which I ignored it -- long enough that you can put something like this in at night and take it out in the morning.

Nothing real novel or brilliant but it worked well for me.

PJ
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