Unlike many I am blessed with a wife who believes in prepping wholeheartedly. When I arrived home after a long hard day at work for the most evil of evils, I was greeted at the door by a wonderful smell, although I could no place it. As I entered the kitchen I saw my lovely wife busy with a knife smashing and chopping cloves of garlic. She quickly dumped the tiny fragments of the seasoning into the crock pot full of refried beans and motioned me over while holding a spoon so sample what she called and often calls her cooking, the concoction.
After having me sample the tasty beans she asked me what it needed, I mentioned that it could use a tiny bit of salt and she quickly added a couple dashes of salt and dipped the large wooden spoon back into the bubbling culinary mass, a sampled a taste. She then with a big grin offered me the spoon and the beans were perfect.
The boys at this point were somehow pried away from their computer games and stalked around the kitchen, with the old beagle Pookie and the new beagle puppy Lucy in tow. Literally Lucy jaws locked tight on my middle sons shorts growling and tugging at some unknown offence that the shorts had given. The pack of boys and dogs hid just around the corner of the kitchen waiting for their moment to sample the beans.
My curiosity just a little peaked I asked her how come we had to add salt to the beans, since most canned beans have far to much salt in them, and we do have several dozen cans of refried beans in the pantry. My soul mate then smiled slyly and said, "These beans are from scratch, I did not think they would be done so soon but I started soaking them this morning with the crock pot on warm". At this point she motioned to a tray of yummy white disks on top of the microwave, all of slightly irregular shape and thickness, and said, "There are home made tortillas too!"
We have tried to make tortillas from scratch before and have failed several times, but this time as we all scarfed down with great abandoned, it was obvious that this time it was a total success. She said that she had used the bread machine to knead the dough. She had to make more tortillas since I ate all that she had left for our daughter, none went to waste.
She wants to plant some of the pinto beans in our kiddie pool planters to see if we can get them to grow. I think we should sprout them first and maybe try a little green house action to get them started. All in all it was a super test of survival cooking, although she used Crisco not lard for the both the beans and tortillas, and storing oils is very hard.
She used flour, salt, Crisco, pinto beans, onion, garlic, (and we added cheese).
Lessons learned: We need a good wheat grinder, more salt, some way to store oils.
