Back with another video… this time I’m going to show you how easy it is to make your own refried beans (frijoles refritos). This time I’m also partnering up with The WLS Reality channel on YouTube to bring this one to you.

Traditionally, refritos are made with pinto beans, but there’s nothing to say you can’t make them with whatever bean you want. Tonight I used adzuki beans, they have a bit of a nutty sweetness to them compared to pintos. Black beans or red beans would be worth trying too.

Like a lot of my cooking, this recipe is not a hard and fast set of rules, feel free to mix it up a bit to suit your tastes. I’ll give you the basics, the quick steps, then follow up with some easy variations you can make.

What you need:

1 can beans (1.5 cups), drained, with liquid reserved
1/2-3/4 cup diced onion
1 jalapeno pepper, stemmed and chopped
2 tablespoons butter
kosher salt
olive oil

Heat up a good sized skillet, cast-iron works great for this, over medium-low heat. When heated, drizzle in about a teaspoon or two of the olive oil and add your onion and pepper. You want to sweat these a bit, which is basically heating them up to get rid of some of the moisture, get the flavors out a bit. If they start browning, turn down the heat a bit.

This will take bout 3 minutes or so, then add your beans and a bit of the reserved liquid. You want to use the liquid to steam the beans a bit, soften them up enough so you can start mashing them with the back of a wooden spoon.

Keep stirring the beans, adding a bit of liquid as needed, and mashing the beans up. You want just enough liquid in the pan to keep a bit of steam going, and so the beans don’t start sticking to the pan and burn. You can make these as smooth or as chunky as your tastes run. When they are about where you want them, add the butter and about a teaspoon of the salt (or to taste), and stir those in until the butter is melted.

Serve the beans with a bit of cheese melted on top and a dollop of sour cream or yogurt.

As far as variations go, I already mentioned the beans… but instead of canned, I tend to use dried beans that I’ve cooked. If you do this, use about 1-1/2 cups of beans and you’ll need 1-2 cups of liquid. The liquid can be the water you cooked the beans in, chicken broth, vegetable broth, or just plain water. How much you need will depend on how well cooked the beans are. If you are cooking beans specifically for making refrieds, cook them longer than you would otherwise, it will save you time in the long run and make mashing them up easier.

As for the onion, add more or less or try different onions. I used red in the video cause it’s what I had on hand. Same for the jalapeno. Usually I keep a jar of sliced ones on hand and will just, but I like using a fresh one if I’ve planned ahead and have one to use. A bunch of the heat does cook out, but you can tone it down more by sedding the pepper before chopping it up… or try more (or hotter) peppers if you want more kick.

If you’re in early post-op stages, or you just can’t get the beans to mash up as smooth as you like them, go ahead and toss some or all of the beans in a blender with a bit of liquid and puree them up.

Like I say in the video, refried beans are soooo easy to make, there’s no reason to put up with the stuff in the can. I prefer using dried beans, but if you keep canned beans on hand, you can turn them in to refried beans in as little as 10 minutes, and they will taste so much better.

Oh, and quick trivia – the “re” in refritos actually would translate to “well fried”, not twice-fried as is commonly assumed.

Added note: I like to use the dry beans and “over cook” them so they are nice and soft and they mash up reaaaaaly easily.

In the early days after WLS, soups are a good thing. They can be very easy on the pouch and are one of the first ways we get some variety in our diet in the first few weeks as we transition from the liquid diet back to solid foods.

Later on, soups are not always the best thing, because they flow through the pouch too quickly and can leave you feeling hungry again pretty darn quick. But there are days where your pouch just ain’t in the best of moods, and combine that with the chilly weather we’ve had here in MN (3 inches of snow in the last week!), and soup just seemed like a good idea tonight.

You could grab something in a can or jar off the shelf, but they’re laden with sodium and usually fat and other junk we just don’t need. Besides, a decent soup really isn’t that hard to make, and if you start with a few helpers you can have a good soup in less than half-an-hour.

So that’s what I did, and for tonight’s menu – Cream(less) of Broccoli Soup.

This is based on a recipe that’s not really a recipe – it’s more of a forumla from the book How to Cook Without a Book by Pam Anderson. Very good book, I highly recommend it. The basic premise for her cream soups is you sautee some aromatics (onion, garlic, etc), add broth and vegetable, simmer untill vegetable is nice and tender, add some cream and puree. Bang, you’ve got cream of whatever soup…

I took that same basic principle and wanted to see if I could make a “cream” soup, with no cream or milk or such. Why? In a word, protein. I sort of got the idea from the NY Times food writer, Biten. He did an afredo sauce that was like 90% cauliflower and 10% cream. I tried it, andwhile it didn’t turn out great, I think it was more my technique than the recipe. So while I could have done about the same here, I wanted the protein… so I turned to beans.

Great Northerns to be precise. A nice white bean, that I was hoping once pureed would give a bit of creamy texture… and ya know.. I think it did. Here’s the run down;

What You Need

5-6 cloves garlic, chopped
2 cans Great Northern beans
1 can low sodium vegetable broth (or low sodium, low fat chicken broth)
3/4 pound broccoli
2 oz low-fat cheese
salt and pepper to taste

Open the cans of beans, drain and rinse one can, leave the other as is. Open the can of broth and have that ready. If you are using something other than a can, you want about 2 cups worth of broth. You could easily use fresh broccoli for this,  just cut it up in manageable pieces. Make sure the stems are small enough to cook evenly. But really, just grab a bag of frozen, chopped broccoli. You’ll use about 3/4 of a 1 pound bag. You could also use dried beans that you cook yourself, you’ll need about 3 cups cooked beans and 1 cup additional liquid to sub for the two cans. As far as the cheese goes, use what you like. I had an open package of shredded “Italian” cheese, but cheddar would be good too.

Then go with a 2 quart pot over low to medium heat. Spray a bit of non-stick spray or use about a teaspoon of olive oil in the bottom and when heated add the garlic. You want to keep the heat a bit on the low side, you are sweating, not sauteeing. You want the flavor of the garlic to come out, not seal inside. Add both the drained and undrained cans of beans and the broth. This is going to give you about 3 cups total for liquid.

Crank the heat up to high and bring to a boil for a couple minutes before adding the broccoli. You want the beans to get really soft. Then add the broccoli, bring back to a boil. If using frozen, a couple of  minutes should do. If using fresh, drop the temp to medium and simmer about 10-12 minutes until the broccoli is nice and tender.

Pull out the stick-blender and puree the whole thing right in the pot. Puree up the whole deal till it gets a fairly smooth consistency and add your cheese. Make sure you use shredded or cubed up cheese, not a big honking chunk. Stir it in to the soup until the cheese melts. If you really want it cheesey, add up to another couple ounces, up to you.

Season to taste with some salt and pepper – use white pepper if the black specks in the soup bug ya, and serve. I also like to sprinkly a bit of cayenne pepper on my soup, but that’s me.

You can easily mix this up a bit by playing around with substitutions for the garlic and broccoli. For example… leeks and potatoes, or maybe some sweet yellow onion with cauliflower? It’s easy enough to experiment with something like this, and you could also work in half-size batches. I’m planning on freezing some of my leftovers though, and since there’s no dairy, it should re-heat very well.

Oh yea, this makes about 6 cups, and between the beans and cheese, you’re looking at about 9-10 grams of protein per cup of soup. I suppose you could throw some meat in here after you puree it to add some more substance and more protein.

Pre-op, the Bush’s baked beans and a can of chili beans in my chili was usually the extent of my adventure with beans. Post-op, I’ve been trying to branch out. Mild in flavor, versatile, and packed with protein (13g per 1/2 cup serving!), soybeans have definitely become one of my favorites.

You can find them in the grocery stores… sometimes. One local chain has them for about $1.75 a can which has about 3.5, 1/2 cup servings (in other words about 1 3/4 cups when drained).  Most places I’ve seen the same size can runs $.2.25 and up, cause they tend to only carry “organic” brands.

Or you can hit the local co-op or Whole Foods and get dried beans for about the same cost per pound. One pound of those dried beans is going to be just over two cups… but like Ball Park Franks, they plump when you cook them so you end up with nearly 3 cups, and they about double in weight.

Cooking dried beans can seem daunting. Do some searches online and they all talk about how long they need to be pre-soaked, and how you can use a pressure cooker to speed the time, and soybeans, well heck, they take the longest to cook of just about any bean out there! Sounds like a pain in the butt, no?

Not really… if you use the right tool. And in this case, that tool is a Crock Pot, or slow-cooker.

You’ve heard the pitch, “Set it and forget it”? Well, the slow cooker is the original. And as Alton Brown pointed out in one episode, a slow cooker is basically a bean pot with an electric warmer, so why not use it that way?

I use a 2quart model the most, you could do about 2-3 cups of beans at a time in here. Just measure out the soybeans, add three times as much water as you do soybeans, turn it on low, and come back in about 4-1/2 to 5 hours. Drain, rinse under cold water, and bada-bing, you have cooked soybeans ready to go in to all sorts of different recipes.

Ok, there is a tiny bit more to it than that. But not much really.

When you drain them, you can drain the water into another pot or bowl and save it. It can be frozen and used as a vegetable stock that has a protein kick to it.

Dump the beans back in the crock and rinse them under slow running cold water. This will stop the cooking process, and as you do so, run your finger through the beans (wash your hand first!) and loosen the hulls. They’ll sort of float to the top… yank ‘em outta there. Post WLS, we tend to have enough issues with gas. The hulls don’t digest well and will only up the ante there.

After you rinse, let them drain well. You have a few option here now.

Put them in an air-tight container and store in the fridge for about a week. Or toss them in a zip-lock type baggie and freeze them. Put them in a large enough bag so you can freeze them in one layer. Or I suppose you could spread them out on a tray and freeze them, then bag them. They’ll keep for months in the freezer, and can just be tossed frozen in to soups or such later, or thawed before using in various recipes.

Another option is to re-dry them… slightly. Getting rid of some of the moisture will give them a bit of a meatier texture and change the coloring from a pale white to a slightly yellowish color. To do this, spread them out on a tray and throw in the oven on the lowest setting you can (mine was about 170) for about 90-100 minutes, giving them a gentle stir every 20 minutes or so.

Then let cool and put in the fridge or freezer just like before.

You can see the slight difference here… in the right side of the bowl are those that were just cooked in the slow cooker and then stored in the fridge. The left side of the bowl are beans that I “cooked” a bit in the oven.

You can do this with other beans too, but cut the cooking time by about half or you’ll over cook the beans… which if you’re making something like a black bean hummus may not be too bad, but if you want them for black bean salsa, you don’t want them that mushy.

I’m still a carnivore, but especially in these early post-op months where some meats are just hard to digest, beans (especially soybeans) have been a cheap, easy, and decent tasting way for me to get the protein I need.