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While I did primarily grow up in the city in my younger years, my parents were born and bred country folks, through and through. My mom and dad grew up on dried beans, corn bread, and homegrown garden fare because that is what they had. While many associate dried beans with a poor man’s diet, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Surely you have at one time in your life heard the saying, “She’s as country as cornbread.” If not, you have not ventured far below the Mason Dixon line.

This recipe is dedicated to my momma, who truly loves pinto beans and taught me growing up that simple things can very often be amazingly good things. Food does not have to be gourmet or expensive to taste good. My momma and daddy believed in good country comfort foods: simple, affordable, and delicious.

Growing up in a family of 7 (yes 7, there are 5 kids in my family), my mom and dad had to stretch a dollar as far as they could. We never went hungry, and we grew up healthy and strong.

Beans are loaded with protein, and are quite tasty served up with diced sausage, rice, cornbread, sliced tomatoes, onion chunks, or those beautiful delicious green bulb onions, oh my I am getting hungry.

My husband and I are big chow chow and hot tomato relish fans, so we usually top off our beans with a big heap of hot chow chow or tomato relish. Beans are affordable, and they are easy to cook. Leftovers have so many uses such as burritos, nachos, tostadas, soup, and taco salads.

I love pinto beans served along with southern sauteed cabbage, heavily peppered and cooked in bacon grease. I KNOW it is not healthy, but you HAVE to taste it just once. I will go find that recipe after this so I can be sure to post it. Yummy.

Down Home Style Southern Pinto Beans and Cornbread

First of all, THE PINTO BEANS

Ingredients:

• Dried Pinto Beans
• Salt
• Fresh Ground Black Pepper
• Salt Pork, Thick Sliced Bacon, Ham Hock, Diced Ham Chunks
• Water

Directions:

1. Wash and sort beans. Be sure to remove any stones or rocks; these are common in raw agricultural products.
2. Place in a large stock pot, cover with water and soak overnight.
3. If you do not have time to soak overnight, then place in pot early in the day. Heat to boiling, and boil for 1-2 minutes. Let sit and cool down for an hour or so before beginning the cooking time.
4. Don’t over do it on the water, just keep an eye on them while they cook. You want to have SOME liquid, but not a pot full of it.
5. The beans will absorb water during their soak period, after that just keep enough water to produce what my momma calls “soup beans.”
6. General rule of thumb is to maintain about 2″ of water above the beans.
7. Slice your bacon or salt pork and add to beans.
8. If using ham hock, place the entire hock in the beans. You will later remove the hock, salvage any meat left on the bone, and return it to pot.
9. I tend to think the bacon makes for a tasty pot of beans, so I usually go that route. Use about 4-5 slices of thick bacon.
10. As the beans simmer, check them often, adding water as needed.
11. Beans require sufficient time to cook. Always test the beans to see if done. A cooked bean will be mealy and mushy. An uncooked bean will be crunchy. You do not want crunchy beans.
12. You want to end up with a pasty thickened soup liquid at the end; I usually take a few of the cooked beans (about 1/4 to 1/2 cup) and “mash” them up and return to the pot to thicken the “soup.”
13. When beans are nearly done, and the liquid is about the way you want it, add salt and pepper to taste.
14. Pinto bean “season” is optional, it is simply a “blend” of spices usually containing: onion, chili pepper and other spices, salt and garlic. If you use this seasoning, remember that it contains salt so don’t add too much extra salt.
15. When beans are the way you want them, cover them and let sit warm on the stove until time to eat.

Serving Suggestions:

• Crumble cornbread in bowl; ladle soup beans on top; add chow-chow and chopped diced onions.
• Top hot pinto beans with cheese, sour cream, and jalapenos, and chopped onions.
• Serve a large green onion with a nice size bulb alongside. Take a bite of beans, a bite of onion, and so on.
• Place warm cooked rice in bowl; add beans to bowl along with diced Hillshire Farms Hot Links and stir. Top with Hot Chow Chow.
• Make refried beans out of leftovers. Use in burritos, tostadas, nachos, or as a side dish topped with melted quesadilla cheese.

Second of all, THE CORNBREAD

My momma taught me to have one pan for cornbread and nothing else. I use Old Mountain Pre-Seasoned Iron Skillets. It is best not to wash your cornbread skillet with certain soaps, abrasives, etc. as it will affect the seasoning; (don’t gross out, just read the manufacturer’s directions).

Based on how you use your skillet, it is most likely you will, at some point, have to re-season it. It is not hard to do, just follow the directions that came with your iron skillet. I have one iron skillet for JUST cornbread, and other skillets for frying, blackening, etc.

In case you lost your directions on how to re-season your iron skillet. I’ll make a note to add a post on how to do that very thing.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup yellow corn meal
• 1/2 cup all purpose flour
• 1 1/4 teaspoons salt
• 1 cup whole or lowfat buttermilk
• 1/2 cup white sweet milk
• 1 large egg
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon Arm and Hammer baking soda
• 1/4 cup melted Crisco shortening
• 2 tablespoons Crisco shortening for prepping skillet (I prefer Crisco; I’m a brand freak with some stuff)

Directions:

1. Heat oven to 450 degrees.
2. Combine everything in a mixing bowl, except the 2 tablespoons Crisco. Make note the 1/4 shortening should be MELTED prior to adding.
3. Place 2 tablespoons Crisco in your cornbread only iron skillet.
4. Place in oven to heat.
5. Don’t leave and go watch TV or wander off outside. Shortening CAN CATCH FIRE!
6. You want to get the shortening hot enough not to BURN or SMOKE TOO MUCH, but hot enough to “fry” that cornbread mixture when it is added to the pan. This takes practice, but is not hard once mastered. It should make a nice, sweet, SIZZLING sound.
7. Once heated sufficiently, again practice makes perfect, CAREFULLY (don’t get burned) pour your cornbread mixture into the hot iron skillet.
8. Use a spatula or wooden spoon to gently spread in the pan evenly if necessary.
9. Bake 25-30 minutes or until golden brown on top.
10. Remove from oven, and use a butter knife or spatula to “loosen” the cornbread edges from skillet. I have also been known to take a spatula and slide it “up under” my cornbread to make sure it plans to release properly.
11. CAREFULLY, I cannot stress this enough, place a plate on top of the iron skillet larger than its diameter, and flip the skillet.
12. Hopefully, again practice makes perfect, your cornbread releases perfectly onto the plate.
13. If it does not, it is absolutely fine. It won’t hurt the bread, the plate, you, or the skillet.
14. Just maybe your pride cause you wanted to be like those waiters and waitresses at that restaurant called “Cock of the Walk;” they came to your table and threw the cornbread up in the air, perfectly every time.
15. NEWS FLASH… I am suspecting that their cornbread got released in the kitchen before they came to your table?
16. Their skill lay in the fact they could throw and catch. The release came from inside the kitchen. I don’t know for sure, I never worked there.

Serving Suggestions:

• Slice cornbread, insert room temperature butter (NOT margarine) inside slices, and close cornbread back to allow butter to melt.
• Crumble cornbread into a chilled glass of buttermilk (THIS is living. You either LIKE or DON’T LIKE buttermilk.) Can’t say you hate it til you try it. You can also crumble it in a glass of sweet milk if you do not like buttermilk.
• This is more of a VARIATION than a serving suggestion: instead of cooking cornbread, I fry it like pancakes in a hot skillet. Cornbread “fritters.”
• Another variation, I see this as a separate post, and that is my homemade Hush Puppies! Too GOOD!

Traditionally in New Orleans, Monday was Wash Day.

So on Mondays, the cook of the house needed a dish that could be easily prepared and free her up for Laundry Duties.

Red beans can cook during the day with little tending, and produce a very filling and delicious meal.

When I serve Red Beans Rice, I usually include the main dish, a green salad, and a crusty loaf of French Bread.

Here is a list of what you’ll need:

• One bag of red kidney beans
• One smoked ham hock (you can substitute bacon)
• One green bell pepper
• Hillshire Farms Beef Hot Links, or or any Smoked Beef Sausage
• Smoked ham cubes (optional)
• Rice (we use Jasmine Rice, it is so fragrant); another good brand is Zatarain’s but I cannot always find it
• French Bread Loaf (you can purchase this or make homemade)
• Bacon (I like Hormel Low Sodium
• Salad Ingredients
• Salt, Pepper, Seasonings, Butter, Garlic
• Optional for top of dish: sliced onions, grated cheese, hot tomato relish, hot chow chow

First, there are many kinds of sausage. We prefer the beef sausage, although you could use the mixed.

What we PREFER are Hillshire Farms Beef Hot Links with Chili Peppers:

Hillshire Farms Hot Links

If you can’t find those, this will work as well:

hillshire farms HOT smoked sausage

If you cannot find Hillshire Farms, you can substitute what you have available.

Let’s get this show on the road.

I got LOTS of LAUNDRY to do.

Use a large stockpot. Rinse and sort beans. Remove any small rocks that often show up in dried beans. It can’t be helped.

I sometimes soak my beans overnight.

Place beans in pot, add water to cover plus about 4 inches.

Soak overnight OR bring to a boil, boil 1 minute, then let sit for about 30 minutes.

The size of your family should determine what size bag of beans you need.

Remember these beans are going to absorb water and swell, use the serving size on the package as a guide.

Until you are used to cooking dried beans, a little more won’t hurt.

Leftover beans are great in soft tacos, burritos, and on nachos.

Add your ham hock to the pot. Make sure you have enough water. You don’t want to end up with a ton of water left over after cooking.

So add enough to cover everything plus an inch or so, this is not rocket science.

A note about ham hocks; we lived in North Carolina when Magpie was born and there was the neatest little country store near us with a meat counter. I am talking C-O-U-N-T-R-Y. Souse Country, okay? Hoop Cheese in a glass dome, sandwiches made to order with fresh sliced liver cheese, omg here I go again. Now I am wanting a fresh liver cheese sandwich with lots of mayo and a big tomato slice. Heavy on the salt and pepper.

When it comes to a liver cheese sandwich, I am like Jimmy Buffet wanting a CHEESEBURGER in Paradise.

HEY! Liver cheese, LOTS OF MAYO, etc. AIN’T ON MY DIET! Yikes!

Oh Doctor Please Help Me I’m Damaged (Rolling Stones!)

Ok, I am allright now. I did some quick yoga breathing and briefly meditated.

ANYWAY…..they had fresh country ham hocks at that store in the meat counter. I am not talking about the packaged ham hocks you get at the supermarket that do add flavor, but these had some serious meat on them.  And they seemed saltier, and with a different KIND of salt.

These hocks were just Good, fresh, salty hock meat. Hock meat is gold in a bean pot. We have thought about moving back up there just for the ham hocks.

Ham hocks provide a fabulous flavor to beans that bacon just won’t duplicate. The hock stews in those beans, releases flavor, it is terrific.

So, if you have a ham hock (if hocks are small, you can add two) put it in the pot.

If you are using bacon instead, LIGHTLY fry that bacon up in a small skillet just to get its juices flowing. That is when Mickey comes running and panting into my kitchen and asks me to fry him up some bacon. He LOVES bacon. And bacon ain’t on HIS diet!

Don’t cook it all the way through, just get it to render up some grease, then put the semi cooked bacon (we want a little of the fat still on there to cook into the beans) into the bean pot along with a couple teaspoons of the bacon grease. For a small bag of beans, I’d say about 3 bacon slices. We’ll need a little more bacon later for something else, but these 3 slices go into the bean pot.

Now, the pot matters. Beans will stick under certain circumstances. When I cook beans and stews that will cook over a long period of time, I use my wonderful no stick stock pot.

So we have water, beans, ham hock or bacon, we are ready to go.

Peel one small garlic clove and toss it in the pot, whole.

Turn on the heat, you don’t want a massively boiling pot of beans. The word here is SIMMER.

Get it going, then keep an eye on it, add water as needed to keep them from boiling down.

The goal here is to end up with a bean “gravy” so to speak. Something you can slide that slice of french bread in and sop it up.

If you add too much water, you won’t get the gravy. So do your chores, check the beans. I put mine on low, add a lid slightly ajar, then I do, oh yeah, it is laundry day, so I do laundry and keep checking the beans. Stir them often with a wooden spoon to make sure to keep them from sticking. In the right kind of pot, that is not a problem. Add a little water here and there as needed, I don’t want to end up with too much water so I add enough to keep the beans simmering without burning, and just about 1/2-1″ over top of beans.

By the way, if you don’t have any laundry, you can still cook red beans.

You don’t decide to cook beans one hour before dinner okay? You gotta plan this.

Oh, and I have done this. I keep pots on the stove all the time cause I cook all the time. I don’t want to put them up and take them out and put them up and take them out. I have put beans on the stove to soak and put the lid on. And then forgot all about them. No kidding. Could have been a slumber party, or a camp out, or I just got busy, or flat forgot is most likely. Couple days later? I grab that stock pot to make a stew and UUGH! YUCK! (right to the Compost Bin..what a waste!)

(I don’t use the large stock pot on a daily basis, so I just, you know, forgot!) So…don’t soak the beans and forget about them.

Don’t do that.

This will take a little while. Some folks say two hours, I cook my beans longer than that. NOT all day, but you don’t want crunchy beans and you want a good flavored “gravy.” I like to let mine sit with the lid on an hour or so after cooking to thicken.

You can always take a bean out of the pot and taste it, or try to “smush it.” Beans should “smush” easily.

The water should get lower down toward the top of those beans and take on a sort of funky chocolate milky looking color. It is “gravying” up.

At this point, I remove the ham hock and let it cool, plus I can better gauge the water level without that in there.

I pull the meat from the hock, if there is any, and you gotta really break that hock up and peel back some fat to find the meat. Add the meat back to the pot. If you have smoked ham cubes, add them to the pot. You don’t need a whole lot because we are adding sausage too, and the smoked ham cubes are optional.

The reason I started using the smoked ham cubes was because we had to replace the North Carolina ham hock meat with something, and smoked ham cubes are easy to come by. Our supermarket sells them prepackaged, or you can ask your deli to cut you a piece of ham, NOT sliced, just one hunk of ham. Then cube it and use that.

I don’t normally give my dogs bones, but Clarence loves a good ham hock bone so I, against my better judgment, give him the ham hock and he makes love to it out back all night long.

I take out about a 1/4 cup-1/2 cup of the beans, no water, just beans. I “smush” them into a smooth paste, and put them back in the pot and stir.

Put another 3 bacon slices in a skillet and fry up crisp. Place bacon in a small bowl to crumble, leave some of the grease in the pan (it IS bacon grease, so you decide how much to leave!)

Add in diced smoked sausage (the Hillshire Farms sausage.)

Dice up bell pepper and add to Hillshire Sausage skillet, add one clove minced garlic. Gently “fry” that up.

Add to bean pot.

Cook a little longer.

When you think the beans are done, put a lid on them, turn them off, and leave them alone. Don’t take the lid off and let the heat out etc. A note about the bean gravy I talk about a lot: if you are careful not to have too much water in the beans, when they have almost cooked down and are done, you don’t want to add more water. What will happen, as the beans cool, the “gravy” will thicken. By the next day, refrigerated leftovers will be more of a thick paste than watered down beans. For this reason, I cook my beans earlier in the day, and they have been sitting an hour or so before dinner cooling down. These are great as leftovers the next day.

Make your rice. Rice can be cooked really anytime during the above process and kept on the stove. It will get warmed up when the beans are placed on top, so you can make your rice ahead. If you have never tried Jasmine Rice, give that a try. Put that on your Bucket List, it is really a unique rice, and not just for Chinese food, we use it for a variety of dishes. Very pleasing aroma.

Make your salad. Again something you could have done already and set in frig.

Prepare the garlic bread. Melt half stick butter in pan. Add minced garlic. Let cook a few minutes (don’t burn butter). Slice open the french bread loaf ( I like Pepperidge Farm, brush garlic butter mix along both “sides” of the bread, don’t be stingy. Sprinkle with shredded 5 cheese Mexican blend, place BACK together butter to butter, brush outside with more butter garlic mix. Wrap tightly in foil, and place in oven to “warm.” I usually put it in for about 10 minutes on 350 and then turn it down to about 175 to keep warm.

If you are going to use the shredded cheese and onions, get that shredded (cheese) and diced (onions).

There are two ways to serve the red beans. One method I use a lot is to go ahead and add the rice to the bean pot. If you’ve cooked the beans down properly, and got a good gravy and not too much water, it works great. Then ladle the beans into a bowl, and add (if desired) cheese, chow chow, tomato relish, bacon, onions, etc.

OR: you can place rice on plate. Ladle beans AND some gravy on top. Add salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Lightly microwave if you think it needs warming up, not too long, just enough to warm.

Add the shredded cheese, crumbled bacon, and diced onions.

Top with salsa, hot tomato relish, or chow chow. Our preferred is hot tomato relish. Sometimes we use chow chow AND relish.

Dig in.

Refrigerate leftovers. (there were leftovers? How come?)

Remember:

• french bread dipped in red bean gravy is a food group
• for hubby’s lunch next day, put rice in a bowl and add beans. Let him add relish at time of eating.
• don’t forget that you put beans into soak and go off to Florida or something; that will stink when you get back and draw gnats
  
• and did you get your laundry all done?

Happy Eating!

~ the Rancher’s Daughter ( I am working on printer friendly shorter versions of my recipes,  BEAR with ME!)
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