It's my same old 1970's recipe for chili, updated to remove the meat and fat and now made with (mostly) pressure cooker beans. One of the best ways to avoid the BPA in canned vegetables and beans is to avoid the canned products themselves. So yesterday, I used my pressure cooker to make pinto beans and kidney beans for chili. I say (mostly) pressure cooker beans because I could not find dried dark red kidney beans at the grocery stores in my area. Dark red kidney beans taste so much richer than regular red kidney beans that I had to add one can of them to the chili. At least I reduced exposure to BPA by a lot and maybe next time I will leave out the dark red beans.
I am still a novice with the pressure cooker so I looked for help in cooking beans. Jill Nussinow, the Veggie Queen, has a blog, "Green Cooking in a Pressure Cooker" and dvd's with instructions. The most useful and most accessible information was provided by Miss Vickie . It was a great help with the steps and timing, but some experience is necessary. I didn't remember to turn down the burner once pressure was reached so the beans were unevenly cooked with some still quite hard and some already mushy. But, guess what? They tasted fine after stove top cooking for an hour this morning.
I really like the speed of food preparation with the pressure cooker, so I will try it again.
ADDITION
Thank you to Jill Nussinow, The Veggie Queen, for a link to her video on how to cook beans. Jill tells you everything you need to know about the basics of pressure cooking beans in just over 2 minutes.
