I'm really starting to think that cooking black beans from dried is not worth my time, energy, or the ginormous effing mess that results when they inevitably boil over. Grrr...

They're like 90 cents a can at TJs. So two cans plus Meatless Ground plus whatever tomatoey thing I can find on sale (by which I mean some kind of cheap diced tomato) and mushrooms/garlic plus a slew of spices (what I think of as a Moroccan mix: cinnamon, cloves, cumin, cayenne, allspice) and you've got a pot of veggie chili for about six bucks. I make it all the time for JZ's lunch and it lasts most of a week. (It's very tasty too. Don't stint on garlic!)

They're like 90 cents a can at TJs.

Well, I don't have a TJs, but canned black beans are pretty darn cheap. Just not as cheap as dried. And thanks for the recipe idea...

Just not as cheap as dried.

Sounds like the dried have an extra aggravation factor that wipes out the monetary savings.

I have never had good luck with dried beans, though after the first two times, I just gave up, so "never" is sort of overly dramatic there... yeah, I go with canned now, too.

I've had luck with the Camellia red beans and black eyed peas - I feel like I've cooked the black beans too, but I can't remember how those worked out.

I can never get the texture right on dried beans. They go from being too hard to too mushy. And I tried freezing them when they were too hard and thawing them and reheating, but then they were icky from being frozen.

I have great luck with dried beans in the pressure cooker, but I'm hopeless with them in a normal pot on the stove.

Nora, these are Camellia black beans. And yeah, my red beans turn out just fine.

Sounds like the dried have an extra aggravation factor that wipes out the monetary savings.

This is what I am learning. Well, I finished off the 1 lb bag I bought, I'll do my best to eat that up and will be buying canned from now on.

Hubby does dried beans in the crockpot. I have flashbacks to my mother's cooking and don't do beans. I'm sorry, Mother, but your home cooking is not what fond childhood memories are made of. Except for your fudge. That was a thing of beauty.

Even though described how the sudden attention phony and probably promotion for a right wing party, I'm not quite clear how the flash mob was a fuck you to the media, rather than to the men who try to impose segregation and modesty and such. I'm not disagreeing, just don't quite get it.

Well, it is kind of hard to explain, because I'm trying to say that if it truly was against the segregation and only that, it would have been more direct. With a lot more secular women showing skin, women singing, everything that's "in your face" to a ultra-orthodox crowd.

Which leads me to believe it's an even, well distributed "Fuck You!" to everyone outside Bet Shemesh who tried to stir that useless story.

(Oh. By the way. In the local Buffy fandom, we used to joke few years ago that if Sunnydale was in Israel, it would have been Bet Shemesh. It's a very similar name in Hebrew (Shemesh - sun. Bet - kindda like the dale suffix).)