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).)

smonster, I have had more trouble with black beans than any other bean, but a slow cooker really is great for getting beans to the right texture, if you have one.

I like cooking dried beans in the oven, no-soak. I put the beans in a dutch oven (any oven-safe pot with a tight-fitting lid will work), cold water to cover by an inch to an inch and a half (an inch in a large pot, inch and a half in a smaller one), add some salt and a bay leaf, and bring it to a boil on the stove. Then I transfer it to a 250 degree oven, covered. Stir after 40 minutes and add more water if necessary. They're done 20-50 minutes later. Grand total time: usually about 1.5-2 hours.

I cooked black beans like this a couple of weeks ago, and they came out perfect. Just slightly more crunchy than canned, which means when I cook them in recipes they are the perfect texture by the end of the recipe.

I freeze the beans in 16-oz deli containers with their liquid, so each container is essentially the same size as a can of beans.

I recently cooked three bags of red beans, one using a soak-and-stovetop method, another using a no-soak slow cooker method, and the third using the oven method. The oven method worked out the best for me; less messy than the stove, and my slow cooker, at least, overcooked the beans before I noticed. I think my slow cooker runs hot, though, so YMMV.

Shir, I think the US-based site where I've been seeing the most coverage of Bet Shemesh (like, they've been covering it pretty consistently since the beginning of the school year) has been Failed Messiah [link] which has a definite axe to grind (it's a site for people who grew up in the haredi community and aren't part of it anymore -- most of them are still Orthodox, but with a lot of bitterness toward the haredi world), but on this they've seemed to have good information, so I've been wondering for a while why I wasn't seeing much coverage anywhere else in the American Jewish press. I've seen a few articles here and there, but then the press coverage just kind of exploded a few weeks ago, with everybody focusing on that little girl, Naama. (One of the videos that Failed Messiah posted a few months ago showed a man saying that the girls were dressed inappropriately because they presented a sexual temptation. Whoever was filming asked him, "So you're sexually tempted by an eight-year-old?" and he responded, "Yes." It was quite disturbing.)

I'm sorry, Mother, but your home cooking is not what fond childhood memories are made of.

oh ... your mother's cooking was like that, too? I was one of the few kids who looked forward to the school cafeteria's cooking (except for my mother's pies - she made wonderful pies ... mmmm ... pie)

It was quite disturbing

It is very disturbing, yes.

But most ultra-orthodox, even the extremist, won't answer this like that.

I don't have a lot of time now, but I'll try and respond later. Anyhow, the link you posted looks very interesting. Thank you.