I don’t pay a lot of attention to prices – probably more than some but less than Vince would like. We eat a lot of beans because we like them, they have a lot of fiber and with pressure cookers, they’re fairly easy and quick to cook. I will almost always cook more than we will use in one meal and have them with another meal a few days later or make a totally different casserole or soup type dish with them. Last week, I came up with the idea to can beans in pints and have them ready to heat and eat. I wrote about it in this post. I can fit 19 pints in the large canner and 10 pints in the medium canner. They’ve both been going just about every day for the past 5 or 6 days.
So far, I’ve canned baked beans, baby lima beans, cranberry beans, anasazi beans, black beans, black garbanzo beans, regular garbanzo beans and cannellini beans. Vince doesn’t like kidney beans and I don’t like black eyed peas. I probably will end up canning some black eyed peas because Vince likes them and we have them.
As I started to make the baked beans, I realized I was low on great northern beans so I did a quick check to see who had them for less. Here’s what I found:
- Walmart – $1.87 per pound – 1 bag
- Walmart – $1.26 per pound – 2 pound bag
- Azure – $1.53 per pound – 25 pounds bag
- Azure – $1.40 per pound – 25 pound bag (organic)
8.25% is added to the Azure orders for transportation costs which makes the Azure organic beans $1.52 per pound. Knowing the quality of Azure’s dry beans, I went with the 25 pound bag from Azure. One weird thing to me is why are the non-organic beans more per pound than the organic beans? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, eh?
As I was looking to see if there were more great northern beans somewhere besides where they were supposed to be, I came across a lifetime supply of baby lima beans. I know why we have a lot of garbanzo beans, small red beans, and pinto beans but I’m not sure why we have so many baby lima beans.
Just as an experiment, instead of canning 18 pints of baked beans (which is what I’m doing with the other beans), I tried using baby lima beans and only did a few jars. How much difference can it make? Don’t answer that please! 🙂 I will report back as soon as we’ve tried them.
Ginny says
My mother made lima bean soup with dried lima beans. Don’t ask me for the recipe as I didn’t like it as a child. I know she put canned tomatoes in it. It was a favorite of my 2 sisters. I liked her split pea soup better which sometimes she made with ham or a ham hock and other times with small meatballs made out of loose breakfast sausage that she browned before adding to the soup,
judy.blog@gmail.com says
Lima bean soup sounds good. I’ll do a little searching for that one. I like split pea soup too and always have jars of that around. Any time I need something quick or don’t feel like or have time to make what’s on our menu plan, I almost always will fix a jar of split pea soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. As soon as it gets a bit cooler, I will bake a ham and use some of it and the bone to make a big batch of split pea soup and that will give us enough for at least the winter.
Linda in NE says
There is a farm about 10mi. from us that raises popcorn & edible beans. They clean & bag them on site and have a small store area in their office space. They used to sell the beans for $.50 a lb. in 2-pound bags but the last time I bought some dark red kidney beans the price had gone up to $1.00 a lb. in the 2-pound bags. Still a good deal and I never see dried dark red kidney beans in local stores. They’re the ones I like to can for chili. A quart each of the beans, tomatoes run through the blender and deer meat plus seasonings and there’s a nice pot of chili.
judy.blog@gmail.com says
We don’t put chili in beans! That’s just wrong. 🙂
I know it’s a regional thing. In Louisiana we didn’t and the guy I listened to on the radio in central Texas always said it was against the law in Texas to put beans in chili. Sometimes though, I do want beans in my chili and when I do, it’s the dark red kidney beans. I like those in 3 bean salad too but Vince will not eat one at all.
$1.00 per pound is a good price these days. Wish we had some place I could buy them for that price and quality!