I slacked off on my A words in ASL and got a B instead of an A on my vocabulary notebook. D: Back to the A word mines!

When I got home from school, I walked in to the smell of bacon. Sanguinity was baking potatoes, to be served with bacon and sour cream and cheese, oh wow. They weren’t quite ready yet, so we had leftover black beans with a fried egg on top while we waited.

I don’t know how much of my relationship with this black bean recipe is that it fits our household very well, and how much of it is that we love it so much that we run the household to fit it. But I don’t have my usual inertia about getting out the food processor for it, and there are always three cans of black beans in the cupboard.

Black Beans

Fry up bacon. We use the cast iron skillet and cook three slices plus a little more to eat while cooking.
While the bacon is frying, dice an onion.
Remove the bacon from the pan and chop it up. Cook the onion in the bacon fat with some cumin.
While the onion is cooking, get a chipotle or two out of the freezer. (Chipotles in adobo sauce come in a can. When you open a can, freeze the chiles you don’t use on a cookie sheet, each with a blob of sauce on it, and store them in the freezer in a plastic bag.)
Drain three cans of black beans. Whirl them and the chipotle in the food processor. It’s okay to add a little water if you need it to make it all process smoothly.
Put the bean glop in the pan with the onions, and stir in the bacon. Let it rest over low heat, stirring now and then, until it’s all mixed and warmed through.
Serve with corn tortillas. Cheese, cilantro, sour cream, green taco sauce, and fried eggs are all optional but welcome additions. (I just had Sanguinity proofread this recipe, and she says Tapatio sauce, not green taco sauce!)

I’m pretty sure this came from a Cook’s Illustrated library book, though I didn’t find it on the internet in a cursory search. I know the chipotle tip did, and that book is also why our freezer usually has rolled-up uncooked bacon strips, tablespoon-sized blobs of tomato paste, and whole ginger root in it.