Black Bean Saturday

I bought about 2 cups of organic dry black beans the other day so that we could start a new food for Lil Miss. We usually buy canned beans to cut out the soaking time, but I haven't found canned black beans without other ingredients (or safe cans). And when it comes to feeding her, I'm a purist.

Not thinking it all the way through, I soaked all the beans. Well, she's not going to eat that many before they spoil so I created Black Bean Saturday!

After cooking the beans we had a lot of beans to eat! Beans here, there & every where! Knowing that we need to take it really, really slow with food introductions, I pureed about a teaspoon for Lil Miss. And the rest was for us.

I'd been toying with the idea of making black bean brownies, after my first reaction with wrinkled up nose wore off. One of hubby's co-workers brought some to work & he loved them. He's not usually a big fan of black beans or weird ingredients. If he gave a stamp of approval, I'm willing to try.

More bean puree & lots of researching for a recipe that we could use. I finally found one that with some tweaking looked like it would work. The original recipe is from allrecipes.com. I omitted the chocolate chips to keep it "safe" and the coffee to keep it kid-friendly. Here's my version.

After feeding Lil Miss & making dessert (can you tell I've got a sweet tooth!) there were still cooked beans that needed a use. Inventorying the fridge brought out leftover rice, onion & tomato. We had Wellshire Farms frozen pork maple sausage (potential to be corny, so sub for one you know to be safe). Looked like good fixings for beans & rice. The recipe we found last week was for slow cooking the beans & fixin's for 8 hours.

I had less than 2 hours & already cooked beans, so I opted for the one skillet dinner version. I didn't have a recipe to follow, which was a first for me. Here's my best attempt to guess ratios for One Skillet Beans & Rice.