Well today, we are going to make some Pinto Beans. It could be red beans, black beans, any kind of bean you want but today they are Pinto beans. And on the board, you see six ounces of finely diced onions, three ounces of diced celery, two ounces of red pepper; you can use green, orange, blue, yellow, brown, any pepper you want, two bay leaves, six sprigs of fresh thyme, don’t even have to be clean, just drop them in. And when it is all done, the stem will come out and the thyme leaves remain. Stock, any kind of stock you want to use except fish. Soak to the ends overnight, there they are. They almost double in size. That was one pound of Pinto beans we are using.

Optional items are a quarter cup of tomato sauce and two raw bacon strips sliced, raw so if you like that flavor in there. So, we are going to put one quarter cup of butter or olive oil into this skillet, we are using olive oil. Let us sauté all the ingredients that I have on the board and sweat them up for a few minutes. Let me get some more salt to get the flavor out of them. A very simple dish, everything is going in, in one shot, just about to flip this up. We are going to season this with sea salt and ground black pepper. I will let you know the exact amount when it is done. We will just flip this up for about three, four minutes, moderate flame, already this smells great. If you were to use bacon on this, you would add the bacon at this point.

So, after a few minutes that is good enough, sautéing the vegetables, add the beans that were soaked overnight. And in the stock, water whatever just to cover the beans and the second that this boils now you turn the flame up to high. The second it boils, just lower it to a simmer, put on the tight lid because otherwise you have to keep on adding more and more liquid as it reduces. If you do not want to use bacon, you could use pork belly also, you could use about a quarter a cup of diced pork belly. But this time, we are going to add one teaspoon of sea salt that is all. The longer something cooks, the stronger it gets. And a quarter of a teaspoon of black pepper, I used black pepper because I like the taste. You could use cayenne pepper, white pepper. I always use pots and pans that have a thick plate of steel on the bottom, the heat is well distributed evenly and also it prevents onions from sticking. When you use those ten type pots to cook it in, things tend to burn, scorch. That is good enough, now we got to cover this up, it is starting to boil, put the flame as low as you can or a moderate, moderate to very low and we will see how long this takes to cook.

One more teaspoon of sea salt and this has been cooking in 100 minutes and then leave it covered on the stove for a couple of hours, come back to it and mash it a little bit to make it more creamy. It means they are nice and soft and we will cook it down just for a little bit more and watch it get thicker. There that is done, look how nice and creamy, you want to add a Tabasco to it? Season it to your own taste. That is it, all done. Serve it with rice and maybe chicken beef anything you want, a piece of fish, but that is pinto beans the way I made them today, enjoy.